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.

As is mentioned on the PHP.net website today, the latest release in the PHP 5.3.x series has been posted for download - PHP 5.3.1.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.1. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.3.x branch with over 100 bug fixes, some of which are security related. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

Security updates in this release include a new max_file_uploads directive for the php.ini settings, the addition of some sanity checks on exif processing, correction of a safe_mode and open_basedir bypass and more. Check out the changelog for more information on what was updated and the release announcement for a full update.

You can download the source here and grab the Windows binaries here.

Patrick Allaert has put together a shell command that can take your PHP4 code and replace its current constructors with PHP5-formatted ones.

It assumes your classes are always declared with the class keyword starting at the beginning of the line and that your files have the .php extension.

It uses a regular expression in a perl command to search through the current directory and look for the ".php" files to replace the "function ClassName" sort of thing with a "function __construct".

The latest version of the PHP language (in the 5.2 series) has been released - PHP 5.2.11:

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.11. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 75 bug fixes, some of which are security related. All users of PHP 5.2 are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

Security updates include changes in image handling, exif processing, and popen crash issues. You can find out more about all of the changes included in this release in the Changelog and get more details on the release from the release notes. Both the unix source and Windows binaries are available.

In this new post to his blog Kevin van Zonneveld looks to help you make the transition up to the latest version of PHP (5.3) in a Ubuntu Jaunty installation (including a few things to specifically watch out for).

PHP 5.3 is a big leap forward for PHP and brings of a lot of neat features. However, big leaps can also mean big changes and potentially big breakage when it comes to backwards compatibility. I did some experimenting with running a big legacy application and a CakePHP application on PHP 5.3 and would like to share my findings with you. Here are a couple of tips to prepare your code for PHP 5.3

He mentions things like:

• Updates to short tag support
• Deprecation warnings
• MySQL driver support
• Extensions

Craig Buckler has posted a guide for installing the latest PHP release, v5.3, on a Windows machine with Apache (though that part is covered in a different place).

This is the most significant update since version 5.0 and several features that were originally scheduled for version 6.0 have been slipped into the build. You'll be hearing about these on SitePoint soon but, first, we need to install PHP 5.3 on our Windows development systems.

They link to another tutorial to get you through most of the installation part but point out which of the binary files you might need for your system (from windows.php.net). There's also a brief mention of the changes in error reporting in PHP 5.3.

Brandon Savage has posted a guide for installing the latest PHP release - version 5.3 - on an Ubuntu linux installation (since the packages, obviously, won't be available for a while):

With the release of PHP 5.3 to the world, I wanted to be one of the first to try it. The problem is that the typical package managers for Ubuntu won't include PHP 5.3 for some time '" perhaps as long as a year. This is a problem, since I really want to try PHP's latest and greatest features for myself. The problem is, there seems to be a lack of clear, coherent instructions online about compiling PHP on Ubuntu from source.

He assumes you're starting from scratch and walks you through the installation of Apache, PHP 5.3 and how to compile PHP as a shared module to be included in the Apache configuration file (apache2.conf).

The PEAR blog has a quick note for users of PHP 5.3 and Windows:

Some users have reported that the windows builds of PHP 5.3 are not able to open the shipped go-pear.phar file.

If this is your situation, you can use their workaround (run the distributed phar version) or grab the non-pharred version.

On the Ibuildings blog today Ivo Jansch has posted a look at PHP 5.3 from a slightly different perspective - how development with it affects the management.

At our Techportal Cal Evans gave an overview of the important changes, to make migration easier for developers. In this post,I'm going to look at the migration from a less technical angle, and explain when migration to PHP 5.3 is a good idea and when not.

He talks about why you should consider the move up to PHP 5.3 and some of the things you should use to handle (and pay attention to) the migration.

Yesterday saw the release of the latest PHP version in the 5.x series - PHP 5.3 - and the community couldn't be happier. Here's some of the posts from various bloggers about this new version:

• Kevin Waterson
• Stas (on the PHP 10.0 blog)
• Ilia Alshanetsky
• Johannes Schluter
• Ramoonus.nl
• php|architect poll on reasons to make the switch
• a guide on the techPortal on making the upgrade

And, of course, there's the official release announcement to help you catch up on all the differences.