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.

If you've been reading the internals list or the blogs of various PHP developers you probably know that the work on the new minor PHP branch, 5.3 has started now that the key feature list of the release has been established by a public vote on the internals list about a week ago. Some of those features, like namespaces, late static binding, __callStatic and several others have already made into the CVS. As per our tradition of changing Release Masters for every minor release, a new masochist, ;-) Johannes Schlüter will be taking of the role of RM for PHP 5.3 from me. I will continue to RM 5.2.X release, which has 1-2 releases in it still and will be actively maintained up until 5.3.0 is released into the wild, something that should happen early next year. I've been release mastering PHP 5 for almost two years now, all the way back since 5.1.0 and it has been quite challenging and interesting time, and its time for new blood so to speak. I want to congratulate Johannes on his new role that will hopefully...

After a somewhat extended release cycle PHP 5.2.4 is finally out! A fairly extensive list of changes this time with over 120 bug fixes and a fair number of small security fixes and improvements. You can find the abbreviated details about the release here and the full boring details in the ChangeLog.