The Digital Ocean blog has posted a guide to help you get ready for PHP7, the next major release of the PHP language. There's a lot of new functionality and changes coming with the release along with plenty of performance and consistency improvements.

2015 has been an important year for PHP. Eleven years after its 5.0 release, a new major version is finally coming our way! PHP 7 is scheduled for release before the end of the year, bringing many new language features and an impressive performance boost. But how this will impact your current PHP codebase? What really changed? How safe is it to update? This post will answer these questions and give you a taste of what’s to come with PHP 7.

They start with a brief look at some of the overall performance improvements PHP7 will introduce and a few things to watch out for that may break with the upgrade (like deprecated features and engine exceptions). From there they get into some of the new language features:

• New operators (spaceship, null coalesce)
• Scalar type hinting
• Return type hinting

They each have brief code examples showing how they'd be put to use but there's also links to other resources with more information if you need them.