The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 4.4.9. It continues to improve the security and the stability of the 4.4 branch and all users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to it as soon as possible. This release wraps up all the outstanding patches for the PHP 4.4 series, and is therefore the last PHP 4.4 release.

Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 4.4.9:

• Updated PCRE to version 7.7.
• Fixed overflow in memnstr().
• Fixed crash in imageloadfont when an invalid font is given.
• Fixed open_basedir handling issue in the curl extension.
• Fixed mbstring.func_overload set in .htaccess becomes global.

For a full list of changes in PHP 4.4.9, see the ChangeLog.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the first alpha release of the upcoming minor version update of PHP. Windows binaries will be available starting with alpha2 (intermediate snapshots available at snaps.php.net). The new version PHP 5.3 is expected to improve stability and performance as well as add new language syntax and extensions. Several new features have already been documented in the official documentation, others are listed on the wiki in preparation of getting documented. Please also review the NEWS file.

The purpose of this alpha release is to encourage users to not only actively participate in identifying bugs, but also in ensuring that all new features or necessary backwards compatibility breaks are noted in the documentation. Please report any findings to the QA mailinglist or the bug tracker.

There have been a great number of other additions and improvements, but here is a short overview of the most important changes:

• Namespaces (documentation maybe out dated)
• Late static binding and __callStatic
• Lambda functions and closures
• Addition of the intl, phar (phar is scheduled for some more work a head of alpha2), fileinfo and sqlite3 extensions
• Optional cyclic garbage collection
• Optional support for the MySQLnd replacement driver for libmysql
• Windows older than Windows 2000 (Windows 98, NT4, etc.) are not supported anymore (details)
• New syntax features like NOWDOC, limited GOTO, ternary short cut "?:"

Several under the hood changes also require in depth testing with existing applications to ensure that any backwards compatibility breaks are minimized. This is especially important for users that require the undocumented Zend engine multibyte support.

The current release plan states that there will be alpha/beta/RC releases in 2-3 week intervals with an expected stable release of PHP 5.3 between mid September and mid October of 2008.

Overall 158 tests have been submitted as part of TestFest 2008 since the launch of the TestFest submission site by 30 different people from people all over the world. Actually this is not counting the various submissions by existing core developers, who also took this opportunity to add some more tests. This has actually increased total test coverage for ext/reflection, ext/dom and ext/exif by about 10% each. While the organization of the TestFest was a bit adhoc, there were numerous TestFest events in local user groups. So the number of people exposed to the PHP test framework is much greater. Hopefully this will lead to more people submitting bug reports with an accompanying phpt test file!

Our top submitter Felix De Vliegher has actually committed his last submissions himself since, based on the high quality of his submissions, he has been granted commit rights to the PHP repository. We have not heard back from all participants, but we encourage everybody to blog about their experience and provide us with feedback on how to improve future events.

Now better late than never, here are the 10 winners of the promised elePHPant raffle sponsored by Nexen. Note that Felix asked me not to include him in the raffle, since he is already herding quite a number of elePHPants at home.

• Eric Stewart
• Håvard Eide
• Marc Veldman
• Michelangelo van Dam
• Rein Velt
• Rob Young
• Sami Greenbury
• Sebastian Deutsch
• Sebastian Schürmann
• Stefan Koopmanschap

We will provide Nexen with the email addresses of the winners, so that they can arrange to get the elePHPants shipped. Also for those people wondering, you can continue to submit tests on the TestFest submission site. A bit thank you to all participants and TestFest organizers! Without the countless people that helped organize local events, implement the infrastructure and submissions reviewers, the TestFest would have obviously not worked out as well as it has. We will surely do similar events in the future based on the big success of TestFest 2008.

A few weeks ago the manual was restructured to improve navigation and make room for per-extension chapters and usage examples along with improved documentation for object oriented extensions.

The most noticable changes are the function reference, predefined variables, context options and parameters and predefined exceptions manual pages, for which we would really appreciate feedback on.

The upcomming PHP5.3 release introduces several major features such as namespaces, closures, late static bindings, internationalization functions, INI sections, and Phar among others. We would really appreciate any and all help we can get improving the documentation.

In related news, the manual was relicensed recently and is now covered by the CreativeCommons Attribution license.

The PHP team is once again proud to participate in the Google Summer of Code. Ten students will "flip bits instead of burgers" this summer:

• Zend LLVM Extension by Joonas Govenius, mentored by Nuno Lopes
• PHP Optimizer by Samuel Graham Kelly IV, mentored by Derick Rethans
• PhD (PHP Docbook) Project by Rudy Nappée, mentored by Hannes Magnusson
• Replace auto* with CMake by Alejandro Leiva Rojas, mentored by Pierre A. Joye
• gsoc:2008 - XDebug by Chung-Yang Lee, mentored by David Coallier
• Rewrite the run-tests.php script by Cesar Montedonico, mentored by Travis Swicegood
• PHP Bindings for Cairo by Akshat Gupta, mentored by Anant Narayanan
• Algorithm Optimizations by Michal Dziemianko, mentored by Scott MacVicar
• PECL, Website Improvements by Barry Carlyon, mentored by Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson
• Implement Unicode into PHP 6 by Henrique do Nascimento Angelo, mentored by Scott MacVicar

Update (May 11th): Unfortunately Nicholas Sloan had to drop out of the program, but he will be replaced by Rudy Nappée working on the same application.