The PHP Group has officially released the latest version of the PHP 4.4.x series - version 4.4.8 (mostly security fixes) - also the final release of the PHP 4.4.x series.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 4.4.8. It continues to improve the security and the stability of the 4.4 branch and all users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to it as soon as possible. This release wraps up all the outstanding patches for the PHP 4.4 series, and is therefore the last normal PHP 4.4 release. If necessary, releases to address security issues could be made until 2008-08-08.

Among the issues corrected are things with chunk_split, an overflow in str[c]spn, regression in glob with open_basedir and correcting the INIFILE LOCAL option. Check out the Changelog for a full list of changes.

See also the "tribute" Derick Rethans gives this final version of the PHP4 series.

According to the latest post on the main PHP site, the latest release of the PHP 5 series - PHP 5.2.4 has been posted for public consumption.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.4. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.X branch with over 120 various bug fixes in addition to a resolving several low priority security bugs. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

Check out the release announcement for complete details on what's been updated or just head straight to the downloads page to grab this latest release.

Joshua Eichorn has posted a note about an upcoming release of phpDocumentor, version 1.4.0, and how soon it's set to arrive.

The PhpDocumentor team hopes to release the final 1.4.0 stable feature release on 7/20. If you have test-driven any of the recent pre-releases for 1.4.0 (alpha1, alpha2, RC1, RC2), please let us know any good/bad feedback you have from that experience.

Several Changelog entries are http://www.phpdoc.org.

The CodeIgniter project has released their latest version of their framework today - CodeIgniter 1.5.4:

Version 1.5.4 is primarily a maintenance release. For a list of all changes please see the Change Log. If you are currently running CodeIgniter please read the update instructions.

Included in the list of changes are things like:

• Added some additional mime types in application/config/mimes.php.
• Fixed MSSQL insert_id().
• Fixed a bug in display of queries with characters that would be interpreted as HTML in the Profiler output
• Updated the XSS Filtering to take into account the IE expression() ability and improved certain deletions to prevent possible exploits

The Stubbles group has released the latest version of their PHP framework - version 0.2.0 of Stubbles:

The Stubbles team is proud to announce the release of Stubbles 0.2.0. This release is another alpha version and contains the basic MVC structure as well as support for JSON-RPC, utility packages for working with datespans, URLs and a cache package. Additionally the build system has been enhanced and a lot of bugs have been fixed. For a complete list of changes see the changelog. The release can be downloaded from our downloads page.

Other enhancements in this new version include updates to the build system, the inclusion of more examples, changes to several packages including the JSON-RPC, Util and XML functionality.

The Zend Developer Zone has has announced the official release of the latest version of their framework - Zend Frameowrk 1.0.0 RC1.

This is the home stretch toward 1.0! Everyone has worked very hard for many months, and we are very close to finishing what we set out to do with Zend Framework 1.0. This Release Candidate is intended to show the complete set of features Zend Framework 1.0 has.

Following the final 1.0 release, Zend Framework will continue to grow and improve, but there will be a great emphasis on maintaining backward-compatibility. That has been the mission of Zend Framework from the beginning, to provide a professional web framework with quality and stability.

Included in the release announcement are spotlights on things like improvements to Zend_Controller, Zend_Gdata, Zend_Db, Zend_Filter_Input and Zend_Service_StrikeIron.

You can download this latest release at http://framework.zend.com or check out the Changelog for more info in the changes from 0.9.3.

As noted on the main PHp page today, the latest releases in both the 5.2.x series and the 4.4.x series of PHP have been released today - 5.2.2 and 4.4.7.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.2 and availability of PHP 4.4.7. These releases are major stability and security enhancements of the 5.x and 4.4.x branches, and all users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to it as soon as possible. Further details about the PHP 5.2.2 release can be found in the release announcement for 5.2.2, the full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog for PHP 5. Details about the PHP 4.4.7 release can be found in the release announcement for 4.4.7, the full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog for PHP 4.

Among the updates in these new versions many security enhancements and fixes were made based off of several bug reports from Stanislav Malyshev, Stefan Esser and Ilia Alshanetsky (among others). Updates based on Stefan's comments were largely issues found during the Month of PHP Bugs.

Ed Finkler has an announcement about the latest release of the PHP security audit tool, PHPSecInfo, for version 0.2.1 today.

PhpSecInfo v0.2.1 is now available. It's primarily a bugfix release, but a fairly significant one.

Updates include:

• uid and gid tests now correctly test the user and group that PHP is executing as
• Changed upload_max_filesize and post_max_size return '�OK'� if current value is equal to recommended value
• fixed nonstandard naming on some constants
• fixed XHTML validation issue

Christopher Jones has posted a quick update for PHP and Oracle users out there about an update to the latest Oracle PECL package.

Quick heads-up that Antony Dovgal has released the oci8 1.2.3 patch to PECL. Edin Kadribasic has published the corresponding Windows binaries on pecl4win. See the changenote for, well - changes.

Updates in this new release include:

• a fix when fetching NULL values using oci_bind_array_by_name
• correcting when the type argument of oci_define_by_name() is ignored
• oci_bind_array_by_name doesn't work on Solaris 64bit
• issue in php_oci_statement_fetch with more than one piecewise column

Rob Allen has updated his Zend Framework Tutorial for the latest incarnation of the popular application framework, version 0.2.0.

This tutorial is intended to give a very basic introduction to using the Zend Framework to write a very basic database driven application.

Note that this tutorial only works with version 0.2 of the Zend Framework and is unlikely to work with later versions.

He Lists out some changes that were made from the previous document in the blog posting. You can grab the guide in either an English PDF or in a translated German version.