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.

On PHP.net they've announced the release of the beta3 for PHP 5.5.x with some bugfixes from the previous beta release.

The PHP development team announces the release of the 3rd beta of PHP 5.5.0. This release fixes some bugs against beta 2. This is a development preview - do not use it in production. PHP 5.5.0beta3 is shipped with some bug fixes and improvements.

Updates include the dropping of bison <2.4 support, a fix for the DateTime serialize/unserialize and an update to the key handling in foreaches. You can see information on these changes and many more in the NEWS file and can download the beta release from the usual sources: source, Windows binaries.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney (of the Zend Framework project) has posted an introduction to some new ZF2 features - view layers, abstraction and configuration updates.

Late last week, the Zend Framework community 2.0.0beta3, the latest iteration of the v2 framework. What have we been busy doing the last couple months? In a nutshell, getting dirty with view layers, database abstraction, and configuration.

He covers each topic well, providing code examples for all three - a simple view layer (more here), database abstraction functionality (inserting, selecting and TableGateway) and the configuration changes that allow for things like key translation, section inheritance and constant substitution.

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.