As you can see below, this has been a busy summer for the PHP development team - releasing new versions every month, with each version addressing more than 20 issues. Some vulnerabilities and security issues were also fixed in various releases.

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.

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.

The PHP developers have released another update for both the 5.2 series and the 5.3 series. There is a critical issue that can cause PHP to hang and crash, causing your application to stall. They have provided a simple script you can run on your server (only from the command line, so this isn't for most people to test) to test for the vulnerability. I ran it in my local test environment and found it failed the test.

If your server is affected, you are strongly urged to upgrade to PHP 5.2.17 or 5.3.5.

It appears the PHP development team has not quite put the 5.2 series to bed and have released another update for it. PHP 5.2.16 addresses a regression error introduced in 5.2.15 for open_basedir implementations. If you use open_basedir in your application and are using PHP 5.2.15, you should update your PHP installation to 5.2.16 or 5.3.4.

PHP 5.2.16 also fixes a crash in the PDO::pgsql driver when attempting to retrieve data when the server is unavailable.

Versions 5.2.15 and 5.3.4 of one of the web's most popular programming languages have been released by the PHP developement team. PHP 5.2.15 marks the end of support for the 5.2 series of PHP (which is what they said when they released 5.2.14) and PHP 5.3.4 is a maintenance release, providing over 100 bugfixes and several security patches.

You are strongly urged to upgrade to the latest version of PHP supported by your application and you should be making plans to make your application work on PHP 5.3.

The ImpressCMS Team is proud to present the final release of ImpressCMS 1.2.3. With this release, PHP 5.3 support has been added to the system core and there have been a few bug fixes and a security patch added.

Since the initial release of ImpressCMS 1.2, PHP 5.3 support has steadily gained ground in hosting solutions. Based upon user feedback, the ImpressCMS team decided not to wait for ImpressCMS 1.3 in order to support PHP 5.3 officially. No new functionality has been added in this release, but it is highly recommended you upgrade to this version.

2 new releases of PHP (PHP Hypertext Processor) were just announced - 5.2.14 and 5.3.3. Both releases focus on stability and security, addressing several different issues.

The 5.2.14 releases marks the end of the support of the 5.2 series of PHP. No further bug fixes will be released for this version and security fixes will be addressed individually. The 5.3.3 release moves if further ahead in support of namespaces and does introduce a break in compatibility for class constructors. The change only affects previous versions of PHP5.3, since namespaces were introduced in the 5.3 series.

The PHP development team has released an updated version of PHP. PHP 5.3.2 contains a number of bugfixes and some security improvements.

For a full list of changes, be sure to check out their changelog.

This is the 3rd release of the PHP 5.3 series, so expect that web hosts will begin to upgrade their servers. Depending on the type of hosting account you have, the server you are using may be upgraded and begin using the new version, or you may be given the option of which version of PHP to use for your site.

The PHP developers have released another update to the 5.2 series, addressing several bugs and some security patches. In all, there were over 40 fixes included in this release.

For users upgrading from PHP 5.0 and PHP 5.1, an upgrade guide is available here, detailing the changes between those releases and PHP 5.2.13.

For a full list of changes in PHP 5.2.13, see the ChangeLog.