In my opinion 1.8 will be one of the most important releases for ZF yet. While it is great to give every developer the opportunity to set up the application his own way, providing a ready-to-go solution for bootstraping will ease the collaboration between developers. You no longer have to dig into the source code to find out how things work — when you know Zend_Application you are all set. I think I won't need to tell anybody about the usefulness of Zend_Tool.
I hope that Zend_Navigation doesn't get lost in all the news though. I know it from its Zym days and I really like the idea and implementation. You will need some kind of navigation on 99.99% of your websites, so give everyone the tools to handle that is one another huge step — give it a try!
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