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.

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The PHP development team is proud to announce the first alpha release (Windows binaries will appear in the next few days) of the upcoming minor version update of PHP. 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.THIS IS A DEVELEOPMENT PREVIEW - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION!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 __callStaticLambda functions and closuresAddition of the intl, phar (phar is scheduled for some more work a head of alpha2), fileinfo and sqlite3 extensionsOptional cyclic garbage collectionOptional support for the MySQLnd replacement driver for libmysqlWindows 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.

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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. 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 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 StewartHåvard EideMarc VeldmanMichelangelo van DamRein VeltRob YoungSami GreenburySebastian DeutschSebastian SchürmannStefan KoopmanschapWe 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.

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Few weeks ago the manual was restructured, hopefully improving navigation and making room for per-extension chapters and usage examples along with improved documentation for object oriented extensions. Most noticable changes are the function reference, predefined variables, context options and parameters and predefined exceptions manul pages, which we would really appreciate feedback on. Now with the upcomming PHP5.3 release, which introduces several major features such as namespaces, closures, late static bindings, internationalization functions, INI sections, Phar..., we would really appreciate any and all help we can get improving the documentations. In related news, the manual was relicensed recently and is now covered by the CreativeCommons Attribution license.

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The PHP development team would like to announce the immediateavailability of PHP 5.2.6. This release focuses on improving the stability ofthe PHP 5.2.x branch with over 120 bug fixes, several of which are security related.All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release. Further details about the PHP 5.2.6 release can be found in the release announcement for 5.2.6, the full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog for PHP 5.Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.2.6:Fixed possible stack buffer overflow in the FastCGI SAPI identified by Andrei Nigmatulin.Fixed integer overflow in printf() identified by Maksymilian Aciemowicz.Fixed security issue detailed in CVE-2008-0599 identified by Ryan Permeh.Fixed a safe_mode bypass in cURL identified by Maksymilian Arciemowicz.Properly address incomplete multibyte chars inside escapeshellcmd() identified by Stefan Esser.Upgraded bundled PCRE to version 7.6

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