The PHP.net site has announced the release of the latest beta for the PHP 5.5 series - PHP 5.5 beta2:

The PHP development team announces the release of the second beta of PHP 5.5.0. This release fixes some bugs from beta one that could prevent the release from compiling. [...] Our next beta is expected for April 11th.

This is a development preview, so do not use it in production. Several bugs were fixed in this beta release - you can view the NEWS file for a complete list. If you'd like to help test it out in your environment and with your applications, go download it (Winodws) and give it a shot. You can provide issues you might find back to the bug tracker.

As is mentioned on PHP.net today, the first beta release of the upcoming PHP 5.5.0 series of the language has been posted for testing - PHP 5.5.0 beta1. This is a development preview and is not meant for production use.

The PHP development team announces the release of the first beta of PHP 5.5.0. This release is the first to include the Zend OPCache. Please help our efforts to provide a stable PHP version and test this version carefully against several different applications, with Zend OPCache enabled and report any bug in the bug tracking system.

This beta includes the mentioned OPCache (formerly the Zend Optimizer+), the array_column function, support for non-scalar Iterator keys in foreach and titling your PHP CLI processes. There's other changes as well, so check out the NEWS for all of them. If you'd like to help out and test this release against your application, check out this post from Phil Sturgeon

In a recent press release from Zend, they talk about some of the latest updates to the Zend Framework 2 project (the release of Beta 3) and what it offers developers:

This new revision of the framework is geared towards greater developer productivity and application performance, providing rich support for the leading cloud services and providers, and a streamlined and simple workflow for developing next-generation mobile applications and APIs.

[...] Zend Framework 2 highlights [include]: Simpler and easier to use components, better modularity and code reuse, significantly improved performance, an entirely new Cloud Infrastructure component and full PHP 5.3 support right now.

The project roadmap has the Beta 4 release happening in the second quarter of 2012 with a general availability release happening the following quarter (Q3). Guides are in the works to help ease the transition from the 1.x releases of Zend Framework up to 2.x.

As Paul Jones mentions in this new post to his blog the Aura project, a PHP framework, originally targeted at PHP 5.3 has changed its direction a bit - they've shifted from a focus on PHP 5.3 to the upcoming PHP 5.4 release.

When I initially announced the Aura project, it was targeted at PHP 5.3. With a stable release of PHP 5.4 impending, we have moved the target to PHP 5.4. In addition, we have made 1.0.0-beta1 releases of almost all the component packages. (See an earlier announcement from Hari KT.)

The components include: a dependency injection container, an autoloader and a view system that are all self-contained with no other dependencies. You can find the complete code for these containers (and one for combining them all into a single system) on the project's github page.

The PHP.net site has a new announcement about the latest version of the language in the PHP 5.4.x series - beta 2 has been released for testing.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the second beta release 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. [...] Please help us to identify bugs by testing new features and looking for unintended backward compatibility breaks, so we can fix the problems and fully document intended changes before PHP 5.4.0 is released. Report findings to the QA mailing list and/or the PHP bug tracker.

Remember - this is not a production release, so do not use it in your live applications (unless you really like to live dangerously, of course). You can look at the NEWS file for a complete list of changes.

Brian Swan has a new post to his MSDN blog today about the release of the latest version (3.0 beta) of the SQL Server drivers for PHP. This new release includes three improvements - buffered queries, support for LocalDB and support for high availability/disaster recovery.

A Community Technology Preview (a beta release) of v3.0 of the SQL Server Drivers for PHP was released today (see the announcement on the team blog). You can download it here: Download v3.0 of the SQL Server Drivers for PHP. [...] It's important to note that the latter two features are dependent on the next version of SQL Server (code named "Denali"). A preview of Denali can be downloaded for free here (see notes later in this article about the installation process): Download SQL Server Denali CTP 3.

He gives brief summaries (some with example code) of what these three new features have to offer those using SQL Server in their applications. The "buffered queries" allows you to bring your entire result set into memory, making it simpler to interact with as rows/columns. The LocalDB support gives developers a quick way to have a database without the hassle of a server - just connect right to the SQL Server database file. The high availability feature has been included for a while but has a new name in the upcoming release - SQL Server Always On.

Christian Stocker has a quick new post on the Liip blog today about an easy way to test the PHP 5.4 beta on your OS X-based platform with a simple package install and symlink.

Since the first beta of the next major release of PHP was released a few days ago, I thought we could provide packages for people who'd like to test it and see if there software is still running. And make adjustments or report bugs, if it doesn't. Complaining after the official stable release was made is usually too late, so testing your software against beta releases is very important. For your project and for PHP.

The install involves grabbing their package from the Liip server and calling the "packager.py" executable to make the version swap. You can go back to the pre-installed PHP5 version anytime by updating the symlink back. If you want more information on the package (or to report bugs) you can find the project over in github.

The PHP development team has released the latest beta version of the PHP 5.4.x series for testing - 5.4.0beta1.

Release candidates are development packages released to check if any critical problems have slipped into the code during the previous development period. Release candidates are NOT for production use, they are for testing purposes only even though in most cases there are almost no differences between the general availability (GA) release and the last RC. You can help the PHP Team and yourself detect problems by installing and testing release candidates on your own (non-production!) server.

You're encouraged to compile this version on your platform and include the "make test" command in the process to report any issues found directly back to the PHP dev group. Windows users can find the latest binaries over on windows.php.net.

Stuart Herbert has a new post to his blog today that shares some helpful hints about dependency quirks that can come with using PEAR packages and the PEAR installer.

To save myself a bit of effort, I thought it would make sense to make my API client reuse PEAR's existing HTTP_Request2 component. No sense in re-inventing the wheel, I thought. But that's where my troubles began. [...] There are a few quirks in the way that the PEAR installer handles version numbers, and you need to know how to deal with them if you're going to re-use PEAR project components in your own apps.

He shows how a dependency can be set up for the HTTP_Request2 package as a part of the update to his project. He talks about changes to the project's package.xml file and the trick with version numbering to get the latest. In this case, the latest is a non-stable alpha/beta component and the package.xml file needs some special handling to cooperate there (version, stability, release, api and min/max).

Phil Sturgeon has made a new post to his blog today introducing the framework he and a few other developers have been working up - FuelPHP, a PHP 5.3 framework.

Like CodeIgniter, FuelPHP will be keeping things simple but moving to a better PHP 5 syntax. Sounds like Kohana right? Well... kinda. Kohana got a lot of things right in 2.x but the 3.x re-write was a confusing one. [...] odeIgniter and Kohana are the two main frameworks FuelPHP is based around but all of the base code is original with only some small parts sourced from other places. We have taken a few ideas from Rails for parts like code generation but this will not be a huge complicated convention-based framework. The idea is if we can improve on CodeIgniter and Kohana a little then we already have a player in the world of frameworks.

He talks about the other members of the development team (Jelmer Schreuder and Harro Verton) as well as some of the cool features about the framework like its cascading file system, its use of HMVC, packages and the "oil" command line utility (that lets you do simple migrations).