The latest update to the PHP (Hypertext Prepocessor) programming language has recently been released, without a corresponding update to the older version. The PHP team (www.php.net) has released PHP 5.3.6 without any corresponding updates to the 5.2 series of PHP, indicating it truly has ended support of 5.2. If you are managing your own web server, you are strongly urged to move to the 5.3 release of PHP. If you maintain a website that uses PHP, as most content management systems do, we recommend you make sure your web platform will run on PHP 5.3, as Internet service providers are likely to be upgrading PHP on their servers.

Over 60 bugs, along with some security improvements are addressed by this release, as well as dropping support for old Windows Visual C++ compiled versions. If you are running or managing a Windows web server, have a look at the dowloads page for Windows.

Both ImpressCMS and XOOPS offer releases that are compatible with PHP 5.3.x - be sure to update your installs of these platforms. Not all modules used with either of them are PHP 5.3 compatible - be sure to test your sites before upgrading!