If you're a fan of open source development and can't get enough about projects and what's the latest in the online OS community as a whole, you'll definitely enjoy The Changelog (it's a weekly podcast and news site).

The podcast hosts talk about popular trends and technology in the open source world and interview developers behind some of the useful tools you may use every day. Recent topics include Vagrant with Mitchell Hashimoto, Spine and client-side MVC with Alex MacCaw and Foundation and other Zurb goodies.

They've also spotlighted several interesting new libraries including:

• LiveReload
• Requests (for PHP)
• SpacePen
• active_attr
• sidekiq

The PHP development group has officially announced the release of PHP 5.3.9, the latest in the 5.3.x series.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.9. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.3.x branch with over 90 bug fixes, some of which are security related.

Bugfixes and updates in this release include the max_input_vars directive, an autoloading issue with is_a and changes to the FPM SAPI module. You can see the full list of changes here or just go over and download this latest release and get to installing - source, Windows binaries.

As is mentioned on PHP.net, the latest release of the 5.3.x series of the language has been released - PHP 5.3.7.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.7. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.3.x branch with over 90 bug fixes, some of which are security related.

Security fixes in this release include updates to crypt_blowfish() and a buffer overflow in crypt(). Enhancements include the fixes for several bugs including ones related to crashing due to internal errors, iterator fixes, sockets, ini settings and more. You can find the full list of changes in the Changelog for this release.

You can download the latest source from the downloads page or, for Windows users, the binaries.

The latest version in the PHP 5.2.x series has been released today - PHP 5.2.16, the end of support for the 5.2.x series.

This release focuses on addressing a regression in open_basedir implementation introduced in 5.2.15 in addition to fixing a crash inside PDO::pgsql on data retrieval when the server is down. All users who have upgraded to 5.2.15 and are utilizing open_basedir are strongly encouraged to upgrade to 5.2.16 or 5.3.4.

They also link to the PHP 5.3 migration guide to help make the upgrade to the world of PHP 5.3 simpler. If you want the full list of changes in this release, check out the Changelog.

Yesterday saw the release of the two latest versions of PHP in both the 5.2.x and 5.3.x series - 5.2.15 and 5.3.4. Here's a bit from each release announcement.

For 5.2.15:

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.15. This release marks the end of support for PHP 5.2. All users of PHP 5.2 are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.3. This release focuses on improving the security and stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with a small number, of predominately security fixes.

For 5.3.4:

The PHP development team is proud to announce the immediate release of PHP 5.3.4. This is a maintenance release in the 5.3 series, which includes a large number of bug fixes.

For full details you can the the Changelogs for each release - 5.3.4 and 5.2.15. As always, you can download these latest versions from the main PHP site or your favorite local mirror.

On the DiGiTSS blog there's a recent post about the upcoming release of the CodeIgniter framework, version 2, and some of the changes that come with it.

It's a good and easy to use PHP MVC Framework, which takes you on the road very quickly and you start developing real time application with it. [...] Last release was way back in September'09 and I heard something about v1.8 sometime after that. But now it has been more than 1 year and recently while going through news section on CI website I read a post stating that new version of framework CI2 is about to be released.

He walks through some of the changes that have been made in this new release including:

• PHP 4 support is deprecated. Features new to 2.0.0 may not support PHP 4, and all legacy features will no longer support PHP 4 as of 2.1.0.
• Added new special Library type: Drivers.
• Added ability to set "Package" paths
• Added CSRF (Cross-site Reference Forgery) protection to the Security library.
• Added HTTP headers and Config information to the Profiler output.
• Improved performance of the Encryption library on servers where Mcrypt is available.
• Updated loader to automatically apply the sub-class prefix as an option when loading classes.

There's lots more where these came from, so take a look at the rest of the post for a more complete list.

As mentioned on the main PHP site today, the latest version in the PHP 5.2 series has been released - PHP 5.2.13.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.13. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 40 bug fixes, some of which are security related. All users of PHP 5.2 are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

For more information about the changes included in this release you can check out the full release announcement or the Changelog. As always, you can get this latest version from the downloads page.

In this new entry to his Oracle blog Chris Jones explains some of the prompts you're given when you go to install the latest OCI8 drivers for PHP.

There's two versions - the short one that runs through a basic install, grabbing the package and change up your config and the other that talks about how to pull down and configure a certain version of the need comes up.

You can find out more about this updated package on its PECL page and the Changelog for anything more specific.

The eZ Components project has release their latest stable version - 2008.2 - for public consumption today:

The development team is happy to announce the release of the seventh major version of eZ Components: version 2008.2. The main new development of this release is focused on the MvcTools (and accompanying) components.

The MvcTools component implements the tools for a framework, providing a dispatcher, request parsers, routing, view support and a response writer. Examples of its use can be found in the subversion repository for the project. You can see the full Changlog for the release here and you can download the latest release here.

The PHP Group has officially released the latest version of the PHP 4.4.x series - version 4.4.8 (mostly security fixes) - also the final release of the PHP 4.4.x series.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 4.4.8. It continues to improve the security and the stability of the 4.4 branch and all users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to it as soon as possible. This release wraps up all the outstanding patches for the PHP 4.4 series, and is therefore the last normal PHP 4.4 release. If necessary, releases to address security issues could be made until 2008-08-08.

Among the issues corrected are things with chunk_split, an overflow in str[c]spn, regression in glob with open_basedir and correcting the INIFILE LOCAL option. Check out the Changelog for a full list of changes.

See also the "tribute" Derick Rethans gives this final version of the PHP4 series.