I think for a core and initial release it’s a mistake. Worry about the basics and put out eye-candy later. If the main meal isn’t prepared well, who cares about the side-dishes?

Is it just me, or is the documention all messed up?

You need to read this

require_once('ZActiveRecord/ZActiveRecord.php');

// Create a ZDBAdapter for ZActiveRecordBase.
$db = new ZDBAdapterMySQL(array('host'     => 'localhost',
                                'username' => 'user',
                                'password' => 'password',
                                'database' => 'test'));

ZActiveRecord::setDatabaseAdapter($db);

But no ZActiveRecord file/class exists in the framework. Another example: to create a database object, the documentation provides this code:

require_once 'Zend/Db.php';
$params = array (
    'adapter'  => 'pdoMysql',
    'host'     => '127.0.0.1',
    'username' => 'malory',
    'password' => '******',
    'dbname'   => 'camelot'
);

$db = Zend_Db::factory($params);

But running this will throw an exception, because the correct call to the factory function requires the adapter as the first parameter, like so:

$db = Zend_Db::factory('pdo_Mysql', $params);

Seems like some blarring inconsistencies between the code and the documentation.

Particularily interested in that Lucene stuff ATM—search is something I think noone has solved well in PHP yet.

Seems pretty good. It has limitations that need more work to remove. Atm it can only create an index, or query one. Imagine alot of people would like to either remove indexed documents, or update a indexed document, neither seems possible atm. So using it in things like Wikis etc are limited for the time being.

Not quite sure why the JSON is there, as been using the extension which I thought was getting incorporated into the core at some point.

Likewise that puzzles me. I don’t feel like I have a right to an opinion yet – there’s too many eyes watching and it’s too easy to be flippant without really looking. But, despite that, there what seem some strange choices in there (along with what seem good ones) – in particular I wonder about a framework which effectively markets the services of companies like Google Amazon and Yahoo so early in it’s design – perhaps there’s a demand and perhaps it helps promote but still.

Particularily interested in that Lucene stuff ATM – search is something I think noone has solved well in PHP yet.

May dump some first impressions eventually.