The first step towards a full, stable release of the next version of PHP - 5.3 - has officially been made - the first beta (PHP 5.3beta1) has been released and is now available for download.

The biggest change is dropping of OO functionality in closures as full OO support for closures is planed for a later release than PHP 5.3.0. See http://wiki.php.net/rfc/closures/removal-of-this. This release marks the begin of a feature freeze and bug fix only phase. If in doubt whether your change is a bugfix please run it by Lukas and me.

You can download the packages here:

• tar.bz archive
• tar.gz archive
• Winodws builds