After a fairly timely (by PHP standards) release cycle the 5.2.9 release is finally out. As usual there are a few security fixes and a fair number (about 50 or so) general bug fixes. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this release, especially so if you are using libxml 2.7 and XML extension, in which case you definitely want to upgrade since this release fixes a CDATA breakage. Big thanks to all the people who contributed patches and fixes as well as those who took the time to file detailed bug reports that helped issue resolution. We'll see how long it will take 5.2.10 to be released ;-) The official release announcement can be found here and the full changelog is available here.

The first release candidate of 5.2.9 was just released for testing and can be downloaded here: http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.9RC1.tar.bz2 (md5sum: 0252cc45cce713c10e2fae34aa9e406c) I was not planning on 5.2.9 before 5.3 was going to come out, but we've accumulated a fairly high number of bug fixes and a couple of issues with new version of libxml and PHP indicate we need another 5.2 release, so here we are. The release cycle should be pretty quick (I hope) and if all goes well the final will be released before the month is out.