You may already be familiar with Git, but did you know that it can rewrite time itself? GitHubber Ben Straub explains all in this month's issue, which also features tutorials on extracting XML data from RSS, using Composer to manage project dependencies and using the PHP Content Repository. If you've ever thought about starting a PHP user group, Atlanta PHP User Group co-organiser Kevin Roberts shares his secrets - plus, there's our regular columns on agile, big data and testing.

Articles included in this latest issue include:

• "Change the Past" (Ben Straub)
• "Why do User Groups?" (Kevin Roberts)
• "Sprint Retrospective Primer" (Steffan Surdek)
• "Urban Legends and Error Handling" (Stefan Priebsch)
• "Managing your project's dependencies with Composer" (Jefersson Nathan de O. Chaves)

As always, this issue is available free of charge and can be downloaded directly from their site.

• Building an Identity Extraction Engine in PHP (Jonathan LeBlanc)
• 5 Deadly Programming Sins (Michael Stowe)
• Physical Security Fail (Arne Blankerts)
• Database Indexing (Cory Isaacson)

You can also download previous issues of the magazine for free after registering or logging in to your account.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.10 and PHP 5.3.20. These releases fix about 15 bugs. Please note that the PHP 5.3 series will enter an end of life cycle and receive only critical fixes as of March 2013. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.

Downloads are available here (source) or here for Windows installations. The Changelog has the full list of bugs fixed these two releases. If you're interested in the migration from PHP 5.3 to 5.4 and are wondering what changes you can expect, check out this migration guide with a list of the new features and changes.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.9 and PHP 5.3.19. These releases fix over 15 bugs. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.9, or at least 5.3.19. For source downloads of PHP 5.4.9 and PHP 5.3.19 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/.

You can view a complete list of changes in this edition's Changelog (including references to both core and extension bugfixes).

We've released PHP 5.3.18RC1 and 5.4.8RC1. This is a regular bugfix release, the full list of issues fixed can be found in the NEWS files. Please test and report if anything is broken. If no critical issues is found in this RC, the final version will be released in two weeks.

Bugs fixed in this release include issues with is_callable, the catching of an exception in an __autoload call, fixes for the SOAP an dSPL extensions as well as updates to the CLI server (501 response, PATCH support) and changes to the DOM, FPM and cURL extensions. You can download these latest Candidates and get testing here:

5.3.18RC1:

• http://downloads.php.net/johannes/php-5.3.18RC1.tar.bz2
• http://downloads.php.net/johannes/php-5.3.18RC1.tar.gz

5.4.8RC1:

• http://downloads.php.net/stas/php-5.4.8RC1.tar.bz2
• http://downloads.php.net/stas/php-5.4.8RC1.tar.gz

Windows binaries for both as always are at: http://windows.php.net/qa/

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.7 and PHP 5.3.17. These releases fix over 20 bugs. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.7, or at least 5.3.17. Key enhancements in these releases include bugs #62955 and #62460.

If you'd like to see the full list of changes you can see them in the Changelog. To download this latest release you can head over here: source downloads, Windows downloads.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.6 and PHP 5.3.16. These releases fix over 20 bugs. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.6, or at least 5.3.16. For source downloads of PHP 5.4.6 and PHP 5.3.16 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes are recorded in the ChangeLog.

Bugs fixed in these two releases relate to things like bugs that were causing crashes in auto_prepend_file on the CLI web server, a segfault when DateInterval was extended, a return type on PDO and a fix for the count() call on an IteratorIterator. See the ChangeLog for the full list.

• #Trending: What's hot and what's not in the PHP and web dev community at the moment
• An interview with Zeev Suraski
• A Look Ahead to ZendCon 2012
• "5 Reasons To Maximize Your Use Of PHP's Built-In Feature"
• Stefan Priebsch On Soccer.

As always, you can download the issue for free to get the PDF version or you can download the iPad application and get the latest issues there.

Each Symfony Component has been available as a standalone "package" for a very long time, but this is the first time I post something about this on this blog. That's because the way it was done was quite experimental... until recently. Why is it useful? Let's say you have a project that does not use Symfony, the full-stack framework, but you still want to rely on a few Symfony Components like YAML, Console, and Process for instance. In that case, instead of depending on the main symfony/symfony code, your project can just depend on these specific components.

An example of the composer.json configuration needed to grab individual components and define a "minimum stability" for the sources.

The new version has been online for the last week and the Components are now updated 1 or 2 minutes after some changes are pushed to the Symfony component. Unfortunately, we have had one force push during that time due to a bug in the Git subtree command (I haven't found the time to submit a bug report yet).

• An interview with Razi Sharir, CEO of Xeround, on DBaaS
• A preview of IPC Spring 2012
• Sebastian Bergmann (thePHP.cc) on hotels
• 'An Overview Of PHP QA Tools' by Luis Oblonczyk (Softnex)
• 'An Introduction To Traits' by Michael Stowe (CaringBridge)

You can download this issue free (registration required) as a PDF. Additionally, if you'd like to see the first two issues, you can check out their archives to download those as well.