On the Symfony blog there's a quick post from Fabien Potencier (a sort of follow-up to this one) that talks about the end of Silex, a popular Symfony-based microframework, now that Symfony 4 and Flex exist.

What about Silex in a Symfony 4 world? During the last few months, and as an exercise when working on Flex, I have migrated several applications from Silex to Symfony 4. And the conclusion is that Symfony 4 feels like using Silex.

Using Symfony 4 and Flex feels as lightweight as using Silex. [...] Moving away from Silex is also made simpler as Symfony 4 almost auto-configure all your services. [...] For all these reasons, I would say that Silex is not needed anymore. So, we've decided to not support Symfony 4 in Silex, or at least not add the new features added in 3.4.

The comments on the post seem mostly supportive of the decision, realizing that what Symfony 4/Flex bring to the table all but replaces Silex anyway. A migration guide is in the works but hasn't been completed yet at the time of this posting (see this issue for the latest updates on that guide).

On the Symfony blog there's a post with a major announcement for the users of the framework - the end of the Symfony Standard Edition, a release version that tried to bundle in the common tools a developer might need.

When I started to work on Symfony 2 many moons ago, I decided to create a set of decoupled components instead of a monolith framework like symfony 1. This choice was probably one of the key reasons of the immediate success of Symfony 2. [...] Of course, people don't want to assemble the components themselves when starting a new project. To fill the gap, we created the Flex was born. [...] Thanks to the new Flex approach, we've decided to not provide the Symfony Standard Edition for Symfony 4.0.

In the post Fabien talks about some of the history behind the Standard Edition including why it was made and what problems it solved. He then points out that, with the introduction of Flex, many of the issues and flexibility the SE lacked are worked out. While it is a little more complex to get started with a Flex application, the unpacking functionality helps with bringing in bundles of packages related packages without having to require each individually.

On the Zend Framework blog they've posted the announcement about the end of life for Zend Framework v1, the first version of the popular framework.

With the release of Zend Framework 3, it's time to halt development on Zend Framework 1. As such, we hereby announce that Zend Framework 1 reaches its End of Life (EOL) three months from today, on 28 September 2016.

Between now and then, we will only provide security fixes, if any security reports are made in that time frame. Past that point, we will offer custom bug and security fixes for Zend Framework 1 on-demand only to Enterprise users of Zend Server. [...] Additionally, as of today, access to our legacy subversion server is disabled.

You can still get the latest from the package archive, use Composer for updates. There are also services from Zend that can help you update your application as well as two trainings that can help you learn what you need for the upgrade.

If you're a user of the Amazon AWS Web Services SDK software and are using the PEAR channel for installing the tool, you'll need to check out this new post to the AWS blog about its retirement.

There's been a noticeable wave of popular PHP projects recently announcing that they will no longer support PEAR as an installation method. Because the AWS SDK for PHP provides a PEAR channel, we've been very interested in the discussion in the community on PEAR channel support. PEAR has been one of the many ways to install the AWS SDK for PHP since 2010. While it's served us well, better alternatives for installing PHP packages are now available (i.e., Composer) and literally all of the PEAR dependencies of the AWS SDK for PHP are no longer providing updates to their PEAR channels.

He goes through several of the major dependencies the AWS SDK has (like Phirum, PHPUnit and Guzzle) and how they've announced the retirement of their own PEAR channels. Updates to the AWS SDK PEAR channel will cease on September 15th, 2014 but will still be available for downloads of older versions of the library. He also links to the location of the latest Phar and Zip archives if you'd like to use those.

The PHP.net site has announced both the release of PHP 5.3.29 and a reminder that the PHP 5.3.x series is coming close to its "end of life" date.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.29. This release marks the end of life of the PHP 5.3 series. Future releases of this series are not planned. All PHP 5.3 users are encouraged to upgrade to the current stable version of PHP 5.5 or previous stable version of PHP 5.4, which are supported till at least 2016 and 2015 respectively. PHP 5.3.29 contains about 25 potentially security related fixes backported from PHP 5.4 and 5.5

If you're using any release in the PHP 5.3.x series, it's highly recommended you either update to this latest version or you make the jump up to something in the PHP 5.4 or 5.5 series. You can get this latest release either from the main downloads page or for Windows users the windows.php.net site. The full change log can be found here.

The PHP development group has officially released the latest bugfix release in the PHP 5.3.x series - PHP 5.3.27:

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.27. About 10 bugs were fixed, including a security fix in the XML parser (Bug #65236). Please Note: This will be the last regular release of the PHP 5.3 series. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4 or PHP 5.5. The PHP 5.3 series will receive only security fixes for the next year.

You can get this latest release from the downloads page (or here for Windows users). As the update fixes a security issue, it's recommended that you upgrade (see this bug).

The PHP project has officially released versions 5.4.10 and 5.3.20 if the language:

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.10 and PHP 5.3.20. These releases fix about 15 bugs. Please note that the PHP 5.3 series will enter an end of life cycle and receive only critical fixes as of March 2013. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.

Downloads are available here (source) or here for Windows installations. The Changelog has the full list of bugs fixed these two releases. If you're interested in the migration from PHP 5.3 to 5.4 and are wondering what changes you can expect, check out this migration guide with a list of the new features and changes.

In a new post to his blog Marco Tabini has voiced his opinion on the decision made by the PHP development group to set the end of life of the PHP 5.2.x series with the latest release (5.2.14).

n case you missed it, the PHP team has just released 5.2.14, which effectively ends active support for the 5.2 branch. [...] The logic behind this decision is...puzzling.

He mentions the recent announcements of a few large PHP-based projects to officially support PHP 5.2 and how, because of the large jump in functionality from pre-5.2, it might be a good idea to reconsider this (preemptive?) retirement. He adds that making a move like this without consideration to these larger products could reflect negatively on the language itself. Be sure to check out the comments for more views from other members of the community.

There's some huge news from the WordPress blog today - an end of life announcement that the popular blogging platform will no longer be supporting PHP4 and MySQL 4.

Our approach with WordPress has always been to make it run on common server configurations. We want users to have flexibility when choosing a host for their precious content. Because of this strategy, WordPress runs pretty much anywhere. Web hosting platforms, however, change over time, and we occasionally are able to reevaluate some of the requirements for running WordPress. Now is one of those times. You probably guessed it from the title — we’re finally ready to announce the end of support for PHP 4 and MySQL 4!

The last version that will fully support PHP4 will be v3.1 and will be released in late 2010. The next version (v3.2) will jump the requirement up to PHP 5.2. According to their statistics, only around 10% of the installs are on PHP4. They also found that less than 6% of users were on MySQL 4. See the full post for complete details.

As announced on the Symfony project's blog today, they are officially announcing the last release of the 1.0 series in favor of the 1.4 releases.

The 27th of January is kind of an important date in mankind history. Of course, everybody know it is the birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the date of the invention of the light-bulb by Thomas Edison. To this list, the core team is proud to add the last release of the symfony 1.0 branch: symfony 1.0.22.

It's been three years since the first release in the 1.0.x series was made and a lot of progress has come along since then (including a few other branches) including over 163,000 lines of code, 22 stable releases and more than 300 plugins. You can grab the latest from their 1.4.x series (currently 1.4.1) from thier download page either as a package or as a checkout from their Subversion repository.