On the Symfony Finland site they have a post that's celebrating the 5th birthday of Symfony2 and mentions that the latest version, Symfony 3.2, is continuing the legacy and trends the Symfony 2.x releases started.

Late in 2015 the Symfony project as a whole celebrated it's tenth anniversary. Another significant milestone is reached in July 2016 as Symfony2, the second major iteration celebrates it's fifth anniversary. Five years is a long time in IT, but even more so in web development.

[...] Symfony2 was a major rewrite that turned the previous monolithic framework into PHP components as well as a framework to tie these into a coherent framework for developers to build their applications on. Since that Symfony3 was released and was more of an evolutionary release.

He looks back at Symfony2 in hindsight and features/functionality it brought to the table that made major impacts in the PHP ecosystem. This includes things like heavy use of dependency injection, bundles and a standardized interface on HTTP requests and responses. He ends the post looking at some of the new features that are coming with Symfony 3.2, listing out several links back to Symfony's own blog posts with more details on each.

In his new post to his site Zeev Suraski talks about the momentum growing behind PHP 7 and some of the recent articles about companies making the move and the overall impression of the new version.

We’re now a few months since PHP 7 came out, and if you’ve been following what’s going on in the PHP world, things are looking pretty exciting! [...] First, InfoWorld gave PHP 7 the 2016 Technology of the Year Award, which is quite remarkable. Remarkable is also how InfoWorld chose to describe the performance gains that are promised by PHP 7 – and I absolutely agree.

[...] As more and more people are trying PHP 7 out, we’re seeing more and more evidence that the promise of 2x performance is being realized, big time. Most recently, Badoo published an article detailing their experience migrating for PHP 5.6 to 7.0

He gets into a bit more detail about the numbers that Badoo published and gives a quick "thank you" to Dmitry Stogov for helping to spearhead the effort to get PHP 7 out the door from Zend. Finally, he points out that there's a Zend Server version that already runs on PHP 7 if you'd like to try it out.

In a new post to his blog Chris Jones talks about the "gathering momentum" that's forming around the push to the next PHP release, PHP 5.4, including discussions on mailing lists and IRC.

Discussion on the PHP mail lists and IRC channels in the past few days has been looking positive about an alpha release of PHP 5.4 soon. This will be taken from the "trunk" branch of PHP. The exact feature list is under discussion but the mood seems to be "ship what we currently have" though a couple of features are slated to be deferred until later.

He specifically mentions this mailing list post and the emphasis he puts on testing the code. If you'd like to get involved, you can subscribe to the mailing lists here.