Creating A Project in Composer Using a Specific Version

You want to use a specific 2.3.* develop version found in:
https://packagist.org/packages/zendframework/zendframework

You would do:
php composer.phar create-project zendframework/zendframework=2.3.x-dev /your/path/
or
php composer.phar create-project zendframework/zendframework /your/path/ 2.3.x-dev

Or you want to just use the develop branch:
php composer.phar create-project zendframework/zendframework /your/path/ dev-develop

Warning: beware of this method though. If the package author changes version and they do explicit branching, when you do composer update your update will fail! Further reading to fix this problem through branch aliasing (https://igor.io/2013/01/07/composer-versioning.html)

Reference:
https://github.com/composer/composer/issues/957
http://getcomposer.org/doc/03-cli.md#create-project