Pascal Martin has posted his latest summary of the discussions happening on the php.internals mailing list for the month of October 2014.

809 messages have been exchanged in October 2014 on PHP’s internals@ mailing-list — a bit more than in September. [...] First of all, PHP 5.6 has entered its normal cycle of releases, with a first maintenance version at the beginning of the month.

He includes a graph of the (monthly) number of emails over the last year and how October fits in. Topics mentioned include:

• an RFC to remove deprecated functionality in PHP7
• the RFC for the PHP7 release timeline
• Flagging functions as deprecated in favor of variadic functions
• Getting the XML output of a phpdbg tool closer to the DBGp protocol
• an RFC for big integer support
• an proposal for allowing objects as hash keys

If you'd like to follow along with the discussions or are interested in getting an "inside look" at what's going on with the language, you can use either the web-based reader or subscribe to the mailing list.

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 PHP 5.3 is no longer maintained (since August 14th 2014) and PHP 5.2 hasn't been supported for 4 years now.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.

The php[architect] magazine has officially released their October 2014 edition of their publication: "Built with PHP".

This month's edition includes articles like:

• "We Built DataSift on PHP" by Michael Heap
• "Domain Modeling with PHP in Polyglot Systems" by Luis Atencio
• "Test Fixtures Like a Boss" by Giulio De Donato
• "Varnish: Just Plain Faster" by Dan Reif
• "Laravel Tips: Deploying Applications Part 2: Automation" by Dirk Merkel

...and all of your favorite columns from the editors and staff of the magazine. You can pick up a copy for yourself directly from the php[architect] website or grab a full year's subscription (either in digital or print versions....or both).