On the Symfony blog they've posted about an additional update they've made to bring more information to the community: an Events section.

Following the new features we've added in May in the Events & Meetups section, we're pleased to introduce a brand new section within the main website menu: Symfony Events. This will enable you to find a Symfony event near you more easily.

[...] The Events section itself has also been improved, again! We've added a map where you can see at a glance where are organized all the upcoming Symfony events. You can find on the map: all the upcoming official Symfony conferences pinned in red and all the upcoming Symfony community events pinned in blue.

They also added a feature that will automatically pull in Symfony events from the Meetup.com site so there's no need to list them in both places.

The TutsPlus.com site has continued their series covering the use of PHP and the Yii2 framework to build an application from the ground up (a "startup"). In this latest post the author covers some major feature enhancements, how to handle them and the code to add in the one he chose - an "Activity Planning" feature.

These days I'm most often working to add small incremental improvements to Meeting Planner. The basics work pretty well, and I'm trying to gradually improve the application based on my vision and people's feedback. Sometimes, my vision is for a bigger change, and that can be harder now that the codebase has grown so much.

In today's tutorial, I'm going to talk about ways to think about making bigger changes to an existing codebase. Specifically, I'll walk you through the impacts of adding the ability for meeting participants to collaboratively brainstorm and decide on activities, i.e. what we should do when we meet up.

His intent is to expand the scheduling support for the product to add the idea of "activities" to the invitations. These are suggestions of things to do during the time specified (if there's not only one option). He starts off by scoping out the changes that will be required including both the customer and code facing impacts. The tutorial then goes through some of the highlights of the code added to include this new feature. Finally he loops back around and reflects on the changes made during this latest addition and how his expectations measured up against the reality of the work done.

The Laravel News site has posted a look ahead at Laravel 5.2, the next minor version release of the popular framework.

ravel 5.2 development is underway and so far a few nice additions have been announced. Let’s take a look at everything we know is coming to the release.

Among the things mentioned are improvements/features like:

• Implicit model binding
• Form Array Validation
• Collections Wildcards
• Database Session Driver updates

This version isn't released yet (as of the time of this post) but it's coming soon. Keep an eye on the main Laravel site for more information.

On the Envato blog there's a recent post that covers some of the future of WordPress resulting from some discussions at a recent Future of WordPress panel from the WP Think Tank.

There’s one thing that we can all agree on: the future of WordPress is bright. Outside of this, the ever-passionate WordPress community is a hotbed for debates on where WordPress should go from here. With 22% of websites running on WordPress, a vibrant open-source community, amazing themes and plugins and a developer-friendly mindset, WordPress is stronger today than it has ever been. So what's next?

Their list includes changes touching just about all parts of the application including plenty of UI updates, a continued focus on backwards compatibility a shift towards plugin-driven development. This would allow new features to be installed as plugins when they're ready rather than modifying the core package. There's also some emphasis being put on making it work for "more than just blogging" and push towards more enterprise-level acceptance.

The PHP development group has officially announced the release of PHP 5.3.9, the latest in the 5.3.x series.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.9. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.3.x branch with over 90 bug fixes, some of which are security related.

Bugfixes and updates in this release include the max_input_vars directive, an autoloading issue with is_a and changes to the FPM SAPI module. You can see the full list of changes here or just go over and download this latest release and get to installing - source, Windows binaries.

As is mentioned on PHP.net, the latest release of the 5.3.x series of the language has been released - PHP 5.3.7.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.7. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.3.x branch with over 90 bug fixes, some of which are security related.

Security fixes in this release include updates to crypt_blowfish() and a buffer overflow in crypt(). Enhancements include the fixes for several bugs including ones related to crashing due to internal errors, iterator fixes, sockets, ini settings and more. You can find the full list of changes in the Changelog for this release.

You can download the latest source from the downloads page or, for Windows users, the binaries.

The main PHP.net site has the release announcement for the two latest versions of the language - PHP 5.3.3 and PHP 5.2.14.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.3. This release focuses on improving the stability and security of the PHP 5.3.x branch with over 100 bug fixes, some of which are security related. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this release. [...] The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.14. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 60 bug fixes, some of which are security related.

The announcements list some of the major security enhancements and fixes in both new versions as well as a few new features like updates to the PCRE libraries and more.

Note: this PHP 5.2.14 release marks the end of active support for the PHP 5.2.x branch. It is encouraged that you upgrade to PHP 5.3 by following the steps in this migration guide.

The latest version in the PHP 5.2.x series has been released - PHP 5.2.9 - with several bug and stability fixes. From the announcement:

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.9. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 50 bug fixes, several of which are security related.All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

Four security enhancements/fixes are specifically mentioned - a problem with imagerotate, a crash that can happen when extracting zip files, a problem with explode and empty strings and a segfault in json_decode. The full Changelog is here.

You can get the latest download from the downloads page on the PHP.net site (or your favorite mirror).

The Zend Developer Zone has posted an update about the release of the latest stable version of the Zend Framework - version 1.7.3:

The last DevZone post about Zend Framework was announcing a release candidate for version v1.7. We got a little behind and missed the fact that not only has v1.7 been officially released, but the team just recently announced v1.7.3!!

A full list of bugs fixed can be found in the bugs system and new features of the 1.7.x series included the Zend_AMF component, an update to Djoj, a Google book search API and several perfomance enhancements across the board.

You can download the latest version here.

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.