The latest version of PHP in the 5.4.0 release candidate series has been posted - PHP 5.4.0 RC4, complete with new features and lots of bugfixes.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the 4th 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 4th 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.

Updates in this release candidate include an update to the max_input_vars directive and a fix for a segfault in the traits code. You can find the full notes for the release in the NEWS file and can download the latest from the PHP.net site - source downloads, Windows binaries.

The PHP development team has released the latest beta version of the PHP 5.4.x series for testing - 5.4.0beta1.

Release candidates are development packages released to check if any critical problems have slipped into the code during the previous development period. Release candidates are NOT for production use, they are for testing purposes only even though in most cases there are almost no differences between the general availability (GA) release and the last RC. You can help the PHP Team and yourself detect problems by installing and testing release candidates on your own (non-production!) server.

You're encouraged to compile this version on your platform and include the "make test" command in the process to report any issues found directly back to the PHP dev group. Windows users can find the latest binaries over on windows.php.net.

Johannes Schluter has posted about the release of the latest Release Candidate of the PHP 5.3.x series - PHP 5.3.1RC2.

Just a quick heads-up: After quite some time from RC1 PHP 5.3.1RC2 has finally been packaged and released. The PHP bug tracker is welcoming reports about issues, I also welcome positive feedback.

Here's the links to the downloads: tar.bz2, tar.gz and Windows binaries.

Ilia Alshanetsky has posted about the release of the latest Release Candidate for the PHP 5.2.x series - PHP 5.2.10RC1.

This is a stabilization release with a whole bunch of bug fixes and no new features, so I hope it'll get released quickly. You can help make it happen by testing your code against this RC and reporting any new bugs and/or regressions you come across.

You can grab the source download here and can find the Windows binary packages on the Windows QA site.

As Johannes Schluter mentions in this new blog post, the latest release candidate for the upcoming PHP 5.3 release is now available for download.

5.3 is rather big release including support for namespaces, closures, phar archives, internatioalization support via the new intl extension, improved SQLite support, mysqlnd as backend for the MySQL exensions, impressive performance improvements, ... and tons of other bigger and minor things.

You can grab this latest download over on PHP.net QA site includng both the source for unix-based machines and packages for Windows.

Chris Jones has also posted some thoughts on the new release candidate and, of course, here's the official announcement from PHP.net.

Keith Casey has announced the first (ever) Release Candidate of the web2Project project management system that follows "the concept of a Rich Internet Application (RIA) we will be providing an interactive and effective way of managing projects."

I could talk about commits, issue counts, etc, but that's actually the least important part...As of early morning EST on 13 April 2009, the web2project Release Candidate is live: web2project-v1.0-rc1.tar.gz

His post details some of the recent improvements to the software - fixes to Department filters, a major update to Cascading Tasks and a call for testing from the development community.

You can try out a demo of the tool here and learn more about it in this webcast.

As announced on PHP.net - the latest release candidate in the PHP 5.3 series has been made available for download - PHP 5.3.0RC1.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the availability of the first release candidate of PHP 5.3.0 (PHP 5.3.0RC1). This release marks the final phase in a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features, bug fixes and security enhancements.

Key features of this new release include: namespaces, late static binding, better garbage collection, mysqlnd driver support, new bundled extensions (like phar, intl, fileinfo and sqlite3) as well as many, many bug fixes. You can find out more about all of the changes in this version, check out the NEWS file and can download the release candidate from the QA site here.

Ilia Alshanetsky has posted an announcement about the release of the latest Release Candidate for the PHP 5.2.9 series - PHP 5.2.9RC1.

I was not planning on 5.2.9 before 5.3 was going to come out, but we've accumulated a fairly high number of bug fixes and a couple of issues with new version of libxml and PHP indicate we need another 5.2 release, so here we are. The release cycle should be pretty quick (I hope) and if all goes well the final will be released before the month is out.

You can download this latest release here (Windows release here). If you want to find out how you can help to test this Release Candidate, check out this page on the PHP QA site.

eZ Components, the enterprise-ready library of PHP components (that can be used together or separately for PHP applications has made a new release candidate available for download:

The eZ Components team just released a release candidate of the new 2008.2 release. This release candidate resolves a couple of issues that where found during the testing and review process. The release candidate can be installed by running the following command: pear upgrade ezc/ezcomponents

You can also download the full package from the downloads page on the eZ Components site. Check out the release announcement for more information on whats been updated.

Pierre-Alain Joye has pointed out that the latest release candidate of the PHP 5.2.x series (5.2.7RC3) has been posted for download.

PHP 5.2.7RC3 has been released. It is likely to be the last RC and the final release is planed for Thursday next week. Please test it and report any issue you may found. The sources can be fetched here and the binaries in the windows site.

He also mentions a milestone for the PHP project - releasing the Windows builds at the same time as the normal source builds. Check out on the php.internals list for more information.