The PHP project has officially announced the latest release candidate for the upcoming PHP 5.4.0 series - PHP 5.4.0 RC8.

The PHP development team would like to announce the 8th release candidate of PHP 5.4. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviours. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site. THIS IS A RELEASE CANDIDATE - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION! This is the 8th release candidate. The release candidate phase is intended as a period of bug fixing prior to the stable release. No new features should be included before the final version of PHP 5.4.0.

Improvements in this release include bugfixes for an issues with htmlspecialchars/htmlentities as well as improving on the "max_input_vars" configuration setting to work better with nested variables. You can find the full list of changes in the NEWS file and download the release for testing from the QA site (Windows binaries).