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.THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT 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...

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,...

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.