The official PHP.net site has announced the release of the latest version in the PHP 7.1.x series: PHP 7.1.2:

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.1.2. Several bugs have been fixed. All PHP 7.1 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.

Bugs fixed include changes for DOM handling, FastCGI, hashing (adding http://php.net/hash_hkdf function), MySQL, OpenSSL and a good number of other locations. You can view the Changelog for the complete list. As always you can get this latest version from the main downloads page (source release) or windows.php.net for the Windows binaries.

The PHP project has officially released the latest in the PHP 7.0.x series of releases: PHP 7.0.2:

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.0.2. 31 reported bugs has been fixed, including 6 security related issues. All PHP 7.0 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.

There's quite a few bugs fixed in this release including updates in:

• CURL
• Filter
• FTP
• GD
• Opcache
• Session
• SPL

As always you can download this release from the main download page or the Windows binaries from the windows.php.net site.

On the Symfony blog there's a new post from Javier Eguiluz talking about improvements to the Symfony release process that will be starting with the 3.0.0 stable release (already release so already in place).

The Symfony Release Process is arguably one of the best selling points of the Symfony project. Thanks to our predictable and transparent process, companies can plan years in ahead their Symfony integration.

The recent launch of Symfony 2.8, which will be the last minor version of the 2.x branch, made us think about further tweaks in the release process. That's why during his past SymfonyCon Paris 2015 keynote, Fabien Potencier announced the new Symfony release process.

The main changes for the process are around how many minor versions will be published, standard vs long term support status of these releases and the timing of major/minor releases. With this schedule in place, it's projected that Symfony 4 will be released in November of 2017.

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.

Pascal Martin's latest post (in French, but the English version is coming soon) shares some statistics he's gathered around the usage of various software around the web, more specifically those involved in web-based applications.

I've collected statistics about the use of different PHP versions several times. The first time was in September 2011 and the most recent was in November 2013. At this point, PHP 5.2 still accounted for 34.4% of all PHP installations with PHP 5.3 moving up to 48.7%. This new data was collected the weekend of October 19th, 2014. At this point, the current stable versions of PHP are 5.4.34, 5.5.18 and 5.6.2. PHP 5.3 is no longer maintained (since August 14th 2014) and PHP 5.2 hasn't been supported for 4 years now.

He's broken up the statistics into a few different sections:

• Web server software
• Usage of major versions of PHP
• Usage of minor versions of PHP
• Versions in use under each of the major version numbers

He includes both the raw numbers (percentages) and some graphs showing the results in a bit more consumable fashion. It's interesting to see that, despite it being quite an old version now, PHP 5.3.x still has the largest share in the usage results.

UPDATE: He's posted the English version now as well.

On the Zend Developer Zone Ralph Schindler has a new post about the updated dates for this month's Zend Framework Bug Hunt Days because of an upcoming minor release. They'd like to get all of the fixes in they can before the release.

Normally we hold our monthly bug hunt on the 3rd Thursday, Friday and Saturday of the month. But, since this month we'll be releasing a release candidate of our next minor release, we're moving the bug hunt up a few days. That's right, Tomorrow and Wednesday of October (the 19th and 20th) 2010, we'll be hosting our monthly bug hunt. This is your chance to get your patches into 1.11.0. And, in case you haven't heard, ZF 1.11.x will be the last minor release branch of Zend Framework before 2.0.

The event has helped the project so much in the past and has helped to close hundreds of bugs since it was started. If you'd like to get involved in the hunt this time (happening today, the 19th and tomorrow the 20th) check out the post for complete details on where to get started and where you can go for some help.