The first release candidate of 5.2.5 is now available for testing and can be downloaded from here: http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.5RC1.tar.bz2(md5sum: 2f0c9ecbd50213958e9b69ec69f715ec). This RC includes a fair number of fixes since our last release and predominantly works on improving the stability of the 5.2 tree as well as including a small number of minor security fixes. I'd like to ask everyone to test this release against your code and setups, we are aiming for a quick release cycle and user feedback is critical for a successful release.

I've finally got a bit of free time to official post the slides from my "State of PHP Security" talk from Zend Conference 2007. You can find the slides here. The session was a bit different from the usual talks I give on security, focusing on summarizing the efforts done so far this year aimed at improving PHP's own security and the things we are still working on improving.

The stable version of FUDforum 2.7.7RC2 is now available for download. This releases' focus has been primarily bug fixing with a fair number of small issues being resolved. The install script can be found here and the upgrade script here. The release announcement detailing all of the major changes can be found here.