The main PHP.net site has posted the latest release announcement for a pre-release of the next major version of the language: PHP 7.2.0 Release Candidate 4.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.2.0 RC4. This release is the fourth Release Candidate for 7.2.0. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system.

This pre-release version fixes some bugs found in previous Release Candidates and can be downloaded from the QA sites: source packages and Windows binaries. Based on the release schedule, the next release candidate will be posted on the 26th of October and will be the last (RC5) before the official branching of PHP 7.2.0 happens.

On the PHP.net site they've posted an announcement about the latest Release Candidate of the language for the PHP 7.2.x series: PHP 7.2.0 Release Candidate 2.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.2.0 RC2. This release is the second Release Candidate for 7.2.0. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system.

[...] For more information on the new features and other changes, you can read the NEWS file, or the UPGRADING file for a complete list of upgrading notes. These files can also be found in the release archive.

You can download this latest pre-release version from either the source downloads or Windows site for the Windows binaries. The next release candidate will be posted on September 28th according to the release schedule with a few more to follow to work out all of the potential issues in this next major release of the language.

On the SitePoint PHP blog editor Bruno Skvorc has posted a tutorial introducing you to Xdebug, the powerful debugging tool for PHP applications.

It’s been 15 years since Xdebug first came out. We think this is the perfect opportunity to re-introduce it to the world, and explain how and why it does what it does. Xdebug is a PHP extension (meaning it needs to be compiled and installed into a PHP installation) which provides the developer with some features for debugging.

It starts off by explaining some of the functionality that Xdebug brings to your debugging practices and the features that can help make it flow a little easier. It talks about how it differs from some of the IDE debugging tools and services like Blackfire.io. Next up is the example putting it to use and what the resulting errors look like. The post then gets into the integration of Vagrant with PhpStorm, using the profiler and how to force the rendering in Laravel output (it normally overrides the exception output with its own formatting).

The PHP.net site has an announcement about the release of the latest version on the PHP 5.6x series: PHP 5.6.15:

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.6.15. Several bugs have been fixed. All PHP 5.6 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.

Bugfixes in this update include changes in closure handling, DateTimeImmutable, mcrypt_encrypt and segfaults in the opcache handling (gc_remove_from_buffer). You can get this latest release from either the main downloads page (source) or from the windows.php.net site for the Windows binaries.

On the DigitalOcean community blog they've posted a guide to setting up a LEPP server (Linux, Nginx, PHP and PostgreSQL) on a CentOS 7 instance (not specific to their own platform either, can be applied anywhere).

In this tutorial, we will create a simple web application in a two-tier architecture. Our base operating system for both nodes will be CentOS 7. The site will be powered by an Nginx web server running PHP code that talks to a PostgreSQL database. Instead of adopting a "top-down" approach seen in other LAMP or LEMP tutorials, we will use a "ground-up" approach: we will create a database tier first, then the web server and then see how the web server can connect to the database. We will call this configuration a LEPP (Linux, Nginx, PHP, PostgreSQL) stack.

They create a two-tier setup that involves the use of two CentOS systems (with examples from their own hosting options) and walk you through:

• Installing PostgreSQL
• Configuring PostgreSQL
• Updating the Database Server Firewall
• Creating and Populating the Database
• Installing Nginx
• Updating the Web Server Firewall
• Configuring Nginx
• Installing PHP
• Configuring PHP
• Creating the Web Application

It seems like a lot of steps but all of the necessary commands and configuration updates are included in each step so it's basically a copy and paste kind of walk-through.

Three Devs & A Maybe podcast has released their latest episode today: Episode #35 - an interview with Simon Holywell. Simon is the author of an upcoming book about functional programming in PHP.

This week we are lucky to have Simon Holywell on the show to talk all things Functional Programming. Initially starting off with a concrete definition of Functional Programming, we move on to a brief history of the paradigm and immutability. Following this we explain recursion (and tail-recursion), along with closures and higher-order functions. From this base we are able to then talk about the different languages available to you which cater towards the functional mindset (i.e. Haskell). We then set our sights on the PHP language and what/wish it had to offer when exploring the functional paradigm. Finally, we mention his upcoming book, along with experiences presenting at user-group meet-ups.

Topics mentioned in this episode include:

• slides from Simon's presentation
• Scala
• PHP internals, pthreads and PHPDBG
• Haskell

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

On NetTuts.com they're posted a new tutorial about using the Stripe service to accept credit cards on your site. Thanks to some handy libraries they provide, integration is a relatively simple process.

Until recently, accepting credit cards on a website was expensive and complicated. But that was before Stripe: a radically different and insanely awesome credit card processing company. Today, I’ll show you how to start accepting cards in 30 minutes or less – without spending a dime.

They step you through the whole process you'll need to get the full flow set up:

• Install an SSL Certificate (on your server)
• Create an Account
• Create Your Payment Form
• Collect The Form Values
• Request a Token
• Create a Server-Side Script

Screenshots of the Stripe interface, HTML, Javascript and PHP code are all included - everything you need to make the simple card handling work. One of the keys to how Stripe deals with credit cards is that you provide it the card info, it gives you a token. Your app uses this to work with the card instead of storing the card information in your database (also making it more secure).

New from NETTUTS.com today there's a new article listing out some of the tools of the trade, the frameworks that web development professionals use (and not just with PHP).

New web development frameworks, promising rapid development and easy deployment, are sprouting out at a more rapid pace than you can keep up. In the last article, we looked at the various factors you'd have to consider when deciding on a framework. Today, we are going to look at the various frameworks available for each facet of web development.

PHP tools that made the list include CakePHP, the Zend Framework, Kohana and Symfony. Frameworks from some of the other languages include ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, jQuery and Blueprint.