On the Laravel News site they have a post about the Laravel Telescope beta that's just been announced. Laravel Telescope is an introspection and debugging tool that integrates with your Laravel application to provide details gathered during execution and issues along the way.

The first beta release of Laravel Telescope is now out and available for everyone. If you are not familiar with Telescope here is the quick overview:

Laravel Telescope is an elegant debug assistant for the Laravel framework. Telescope provides insight into the requests coming into your application, exceptions, log entries, database queries, queued jobs, mail, notifications, cache operations, scheduled tasks, variable dumps and more. Telescope makes a wonderful companion to your local Laravel development environment.

You can get the beta by installing it through Composer.

You install it the same way you'd install any other Laravel package via a composer require for laravel/telescope and run the installation and migration steps using the artisan command. This tool is only for Laravel applications and is tightly integrated with the tool. For more information on Telescope, check out its GitHub repository.

The main PHP.net site has posted announcement of the release of the latest beta for the PHP 7.3.0 series: PHP 7.3.0beta2

The PHP team is glad to announce the release of the sixth PHP 7.3.0 version, PHP 7.3.0beta2. The rough outline of the PHP 7.3 release cycle is specified in the PHP Wiki.

[...] For more information on the new features and other changes, you can read the NEWS file, or the <a href="https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/php-7.3.0beta2/UPGRADING>UPGRADING file for a complete list of upgrading notes. Internal changes are listed in the UPGRADING.INTERNALS file. These files can also be found in the release archive.

The next release would be Beta 3, planned for August 30th.

You can download this latest preview release from either the source package site or from the Windows QA site for the Windows binaries.

On the main PHP.net site there's an announcement posted about the release of the latest pre-release of the PHP 7.3.x series: PHP 7.3.0.beta1.

The PHP team is glad to announce the release of the fifth PHP 7.3.0 version, PHP 7.3.0beta1. The rough outline of the PHP 7.3 release cycle is specified in the PHP Wiki.

[...] Please carefully test this version and report any issues found in the bug reporting system.

Changes in this beta include fixes in the language core, SQLite3 handling, the SPL, and PDO PostgreSQL support. As always, you can download this pre-release from the PHP QA site for source downloads or Windows QA site for the Windows binaries.

In an announcement on the main PHP.net site, the PHP development team as officially announced the release of the first beta for PHP 7.2.0 - beta 1.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.2.0 Beta 1. This release is the first beta for 7.2.0. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system.

[...] PHP 7.2.0 Beta 1 builds on previous releases with: the much anticipated Sodium extension, Opcache improvements, Countable support for DOMNodeList and DOMNamedNodeMap improved handling for invalid UTF8 in json_decode() and many bugfixes...

You can find the complete list of updates in the NEWS entry for this beta and, as always, you can download this preview release from the QA downloads page or from windows.php.net/qa for the Windows binaries.

As Paul Jones has announced in this post to his site the PECL "Request" extension has reached the beta stage with the release of beta v1.

I am happy to announce that the PECL extension for server-side request and response objects has reached beta status! (Documentation here.)

[...] This completes the intended initial functionality of the extension. You should install it and try it out, because it might be make your work easier.

The post also lists out some of the new functionality introduced in this beta mostly focused around the fetching of the "forwarded for" information. You can find out more about the extension on the pecl.php.net website.

As was announced on the main PHP.net site - the latest beta version of PHP 7.1.0 has been released with several bugfixes: PHP 7.1.0 beta 2.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.1.0 Beta 2. This release is the second beta for 7.1.0. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system.

THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT PREVIEW - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION! For more information on the new features and other changes, you can read the NEWS file, or the UPGRADING file for a complete list of upgrading notes. These files can also be found in the release archive.

As with other preview released, you can download them from the beta location (for source) or the Windows QA site for the Windows binaries. You can see what all changed and was fixed in this new beta in the NEWS file. The plan is to release the beta 3 version on August 18th.

The PHP development group has released the latest in the PHP 7.1.x preview releases: PHP 7.1.0 Beta 1. This moves this next minor release out of the alpha stages and one step closer to a final release.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.1.0 Beta 1. This release is the first beta for 7.1.0. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system.

PHP 7.1.0 Beta 1 builds on previous releases with: asynchronous signal handling (without ticks) in ext/pcntl and additional context in pcntl_signal handler.

As always, you can download this preview release (not designed to be use in production) from either the pre-release downloads page or the Windows PHP QA site for the Windows binaries. The release plan is for the final version of PHP 7.1.0 to be released on August 8th, 2016. For complete information on what's involved in the release, check the full list in this page on the wiki.

On the Tighten.co blog they've posted their own review of Statamic, the flat-file based content management system with a Laravel backend. Statamic is a project that hopes to provide easy content management, responsive layouts and plenty of features to make an easy-to-use and robust CMS.

Among the developers I know who used to use ExpressionEngine but have since left, most work in Craft and/or Laravel. I kept hearing folks mention Statamic, but all I knew about it was that it was flat file, which wasn't particularly compelling to me.

Fast forward two years, and they've re-written the entire application to run on Laravel (now released as v2 beta). [...] Their documentation is hilarious, the community is welcoming and helpful, and the code—granted, I'm only a few weeks in—seems super easy to work with. So, what's the deal? Why have we set up Tighten's blog on Statamic?

The post then goes on to talk about the "quest" for a good Laravel-based content management system. They also talk about some of the essentials they see a CMS needing to be effective: good user interaction (UI/UX), how much and how difficult it is to customize and how it is configured. For each point they talk about how Statamic does things and their own verdict on the software and how good it does at filling these requirements.

The PHP.net site has announce the release of the latest beta version of the next upcoming major release of the language - PHP 7.0.0 Beta 3

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.0.0 Beta 3. This is the fifth pre-release of the new PHP 7 major series. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system. [...] PHP 7.0.0 Beta 3 contains fixes for 33 reported bugs, 11 of which are security related, and altogether over 200 commits with various improvements.

You can download the source this latest beta from the php.net downloads section or the Windows binaries on windows.php.net/qa. The next release will be Release Candidate 1 on the 20th of August so the stable release will be coming soon! You can check out the NEWS file for what to expect in PHP 7 too.

According to this post on Reddit.com (and this NEWS file update) the latest beta of PHP 7.0.0, beta 2, has officially been tagged.

Fixes include updates in several different areas of the codebase:

• Curl
• GD (graphics handling)
• Opcache
• SOAP
• the SPL (Standard PHP Library, with MutlitpleIterator)

You can find out more about all of the bugs that were fixed (including a sneak peek at what's coming in beta 3) in the NEWS file.