Gergely Hodicska has posted part four of his "what's new in PHP 5.3" series - a sort of "wrapup" for some of the smaller features that have been added. Among them are:

• __callStatic
• OpenID support
• user.ini user defined ini functionality
• dynamic static calls
• XSLT profiling

...and many more. Check out the post for more to add to the list and for some brief examples of the ones already mentioned.

Gergely Hodicska has started a mini-series of posts centering about what's going to be coming in the next major release of PHP, version 5.3. The first article has been posted today focusing on one of the more popular topics - namespaces.

In my previous post I mentioned that PHP 5.3 will be released in early 2008 so I think it's just in time to talk about the features of this version. [...] The big gun features are namespaces, late static binding and mysqlnd, but there are other interesting improvements, for example __callStatic, dynamic static calls. In this part of this series we are going to analyze namespaces in detail.

Included in the post are a "before" and "after" example of namspacing in a PHP application, code examples of namespaces in action, simple porting of current PHP 5.2 applications up to 5.3 and working with __autoload and Reflection.

Johannes Schlüter, the new release manager for the PHP 5.3 series, has posted an update on the progress of the release including a brief list of the new things included in the update.

Since a few hours we're having, thanks to Edin, Windows snapshots for the upcoming PHP 5.3 release. In combination with the latest sources from CVS everybody should be able to test the current state.

Included in his list of updates are things like: namespaces, late static binding, the __callStatic magic method and the mysql native driver (mysqlnd). He also recommends that, if you're currently running something in the PHP 5.2.x series, you update to the latest on that before making the jump to PHP 5.3 when it comes out.