After 2 weeks of inaction 5.2.0 final release is finally in sight. A few minutes ago I've released the last (I mean it this time) release candidate of 5.2.0, RC5. If all goes well a week from now 5.2.0 final will be out ready for use. In the meantime I'd like to ask once again that everyone try this RC, which can downloaded from here: http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.0RC5.tar.bz2 (md5sum: 9a7fb788fbfd2beb8ed7aecb0a7d1598) I don't think you'd be able to find any major issues or regressions in this RC, but if you do certainly let me know, if necessary RC6 is not out of the question.

If you have been monitoring PHP's internal mailing list you probably know that over the last few weeks we've been locked in a stalemate in regard to the API revision of the filter extension brought to light by Dan from our documentation team. This is also the reason why despite this being early October PHP 5.2 is still not out. Fortunately, after mediation with Derick and Pierre the two protagonists of the filter conundrum a compromise was finally reached. I took Pierre's proposed patch for the filter extension and based on it made a fairly series of adjustments yielding a very clear and flexible API (I hope) that seems to keep everyone happy. The patch was committed late last night and given lack of complaints today, I think we've finally got this issue resolved. YEY! The only downside, is that my proposal to rename the filter extension to "Ilia' Awesome Filter Extension" was shot-down, with only Tony being in favor, oh well, I guess you can't have it all. On a related note, since filter issue is n...

The slides from my two talks at PHP|Works are now available online for download in PDF and Flash formats, they can be found here: http://ilia.ws/talks/. You'll need to scroll to the bottom of the page to find the download links. Overall I think the talks went very well, and I hope that all the people who have attended found the material covered interesting and/or informative. I won't presume to assume the talks were fun, but c'mon what do you expect from a technical talk :-)

Huzzah! The final release candidate of 5.2.0, RC4 is out, which means the final release is just around the corner. The tarballs can be found here: http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.0RC4.tar.bz2 (71456d89419e5b67c59aca713a3c86f4) http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.0RC4.tar.gz (41c5ac4a378266b17a7fde9565325cb9) Given that this is a final release, this is the last chance to identify major issues or regressions. So, please test your code against this release to make sure that everything is working, and if not, let us know.

The third and possibly the final release candidate of PHP 5.2.0 is now available for download. http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.0RC3.tar.bz2 (79a9e8ecd8edcfcc033bbd49967ad47a) http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.0RC3.tar.gz (735c8f0385483afc732c09c5bb4257a3) The number of changes are fairly small, which is always good when nearing the final release, but there were 2 important fixes that need attention. One is fix for a memory corruption in the new memory manager, something that could've caused random, hard to reproduce crashes. The second was a fix in the session extension's shutdown order, which caused problems when native objects (objects created by other PHP extensions) were stored inside $_SESSION. Please try this release and give you feedback via qa mailing list or via this blog, either way we'd like to hear how this release works with your code.