At the PHP UK Conference Rasmus mentioned that he wants more people contributing to PHP. There are plenty of ways how you can do that.

Derick points out two more immediate ways you can help, one not even requiring any C knowledge:

• Help test the Release Candidates (like the current PHP 5.4.0 RC8) with a call to "make test" just after your compile.
• The recently added "random PHP bug" functionality that's been added to the bugs.php.net site

The PHP development team announces the 6th release candidate of PHP 5.4. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviours. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site. [...] The 6th release candidate focused on improving traits. Please test them carefully and help us to identify bugs in order to ensure that the release is solid and all things behave as expected.

You can download this latest release from the PHP QA site (Windows binaries) and test it on your local instance/applications. Any and all feedback about issues should be reported to either the QA mailing list or on the bug tracker. A complete list of updates is available in the NEWS file.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the third release candidate of PHP 5.4. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviours. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site. THIS IS A RELEASE CANDIDATE - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION!. This is the third release candidate. The release candidate phase is intended as a period of bug fixing prior to the stable release. No new features should be included before the final version of PHP 5.4.0.

Major changes include the introduction of UTS #46 mapping support in the intl extension and the inclusion of SERVER_NAME and SERVER_PORT into the $_SERVER superglobal for CLI. You can find more changes listed in the NEWS file and can download the latest from the PHP.net site (or your favorite mirror): source, Windows binaries.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the second release candidate of PHP 5.4. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviours. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site. THIS IS A RELEASE CANDIDATE - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION!. This is the second release candidate. The release candidate phase is intended as a period of bug fixing prior to the stable release. No new features should be included before the final version of PHP 5.4.0.

Fixes in this new version include updates to the built-in web server, PHP-FPM no longer being marked as experimental and changes to the Zend Engine, Core and various extensions. See the NEWS file for complete details. You can download this latest release from the downloads page (and here for Windows users).

PHP5.4 it's close and it's time to start playing with the new cool features. I've created a new Virtual Machine to play with the new features available within PHP5.4. I wrote a post with the most exciting features (at least for me) when I saw the feature list in the alpha version. Now the Release Candidate is with us, so it's the time of start playing with them. I also discover really cool features that I pass over in my first review.

Code snippets are included for each example for:

• Class member access on instantiation
• Short array syntax
• Support for Class::{expr}() syntax
• Indirect method call through array
• Callable typehint
• Traits
• Array dereferencing support

He points to this other post for a complete list of what's been added in 5.4.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the first release candidate of PHP 5.4. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviours. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site. [...] This is the first release candidate. No new features will be included before the final version of PHP 5.4.0. The release candidate phase is intended as a period of bug fixing prior to the stable release.

Major changes include class member access on instantiation, array to string conversion now throws a notice and bugs fixes/improvements to Core and other extensions. For a complete list, check out the NEWS file. Download this latest release]]> Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:36:51 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/12683 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/12683 On the main PHP.net site today they've posted an announcement about the latest Release Candidates for upcoming PHP versions of PHP 5.2.1 and PHP 5.3.0.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the second release candidate of PHP 5.2.10 (PHP 5.2.10RC2) and the third release candidate of PHP 5.3.0 (PHP 5.3.0RC3). These RCs focuses on bug fixes and stability improvements, and we hope only minimal changes are required for the next candidate or final stable releases.

Both for maintenance and the only changes that should come out of them are small fixes prior to the stable release of both. You can grab these latest release candidates from the PHP.net QA site to test on your own machine. You can also grab the Windows binaries here.

Around Easter there are different holidays, in Germany for instance Friday and Monday are holidays. This gives you some time without annoying customers and colleagues asking you to do stuff. So what could you PHP geeks do when getting bored? - A good idea is to test PHP development snapshots.

The PHP group has put out the second release candidate for PHP 5.2.6 and is looking for a few good testers to help them find whatever issues may lie deep in its code. Accoring to Johannes, though, not much should be broken this time. It's PHP 5.3 everyone should really watch out for...

So grab a snapshot and get testing!

I have just released a second release candidate for PHPUnit 3.2, the next major version of the xUnit testing framework for PHP.

According to the Changelog, updates in this new Release Candidate include a number of updates to the software metrics that can be run on code (at project, file, function, class and method level), the addition of DbUnit, code coverage improvements, bug fixes to the TestUI test runner and Selenium integration and much more.

This RC includes a fair number of fixes since our last release and predominantly works on improving the stability of the 5.2 tree as well as including a small number of minor security fixes. I'd like to ask everyone to test this release against your code and setups, we are aiming for a quick release cycle and user feedback is critical for a successful release.

You can download this new edition directly from here (no Windows builds yet).