Thanks for the link. Recess is a full-stack PHP framework I've been working on the last 12 weeks or so. This preview release is intended to demonstrate core functionalities and help work out major issues. Over the next couple of weeks I'll be focusing on documentation, screen casts, and stabilization.
There are some interesting and novel techniques being used in Recess that you won't see in other popular PHP frameworks. It's a framework I believe will cater well to hackers and the HN crowd.
This is towards the top of list of documents to produce. More screen casts demonstrating other features of the framework are also on the way.
The overarching mission of Recess is to provide a full-stack framework with functionality along the lines of Cake but designed for PHP (as opposed to attempting to clone Rails which leads to poor design decisions as PHP != Ruby). This way Recess will achieve the performance characteristics of CodeIgniter without sacrificing higher-order functionality of modern full-stack frameworks like Django and Rails.
There are some interesting and novel techniques being used in Recess that you won't see in other popular PHP frameworks. It's a framework I believe will cater well to hackers and the HN crowd.