The PHP development team has released 2 updates to PHP - 5.3.7 and  5.3.8, just 5 days later. There were over 90 fixes and improvements in these releases, increasing the overall stability and performance of PHP. The reason version 5.3.8 was released only 5 days after 5.3.7 was to correct 2 serious bugs introduced by the 5.3.7 version. All webmasters should note that PHP 5.2 is no longer supported by the developers and you should be moving your applications to the newer version.

For a full list of changes in PHP 5.3.8, see the PHP 5.3.8 ChangeLog. For a full list of changes in PHP 5.3.7, see the PHP 5.3.7 ChangeLog.

PHP has provided a helpful guide for developers available at http://php.net/migration53. This will help you make the necessary changes to your programs so they will function in compliance with the new version.

If you are a site administrator, be sure your hosting provider has made the proper steps for upgrading your services to the latest version of PHP, as well as MySQL and Apache (or IIS, if you are on a Windows server). Also, check with your web application developer (usually a content management system) for their readiness to support the new version of PHP. ImpressCMS supports PHP 5.3 in version 1.2.3 and higher (latest is 1.2.6). XOOPS functions in PHP 5.2, though their release notes for versions 2.5.0 state it will run on 5.2 and higher. Drupal supports 5.3 in versions 6.14 and higher and in version 7. Joomla! versions 1.5.15 and higher are compatible with PHP 5.3. WordPress 3.2 is compatible on PHP 5.3.