On the main PHP.net site an announcement has been posted of the latest versions in the PHP 7.1.x and 5.6.x series: 7.1.20 and 5.6.37.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.1.20 [and 5.6.37]. This is a security release. Several security bugs have been fixed in this release. All PHP 7.1 [and 5.6.37] users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.

Changes in these releases include updates to date/time handling, PHP-FPM, internationalization and PostgreSQL functionality. You can download this latest release either from the main PHP.net site (for source packages) or windows.php.net for the Windows binaries.

On the main PHP.net site they've announced the release of the next versions in the PHP 5.6 and 7.1 series:

• PHP 5.6.36
• PHP 7.1.17

Both are bugfixes for their respective versions and are bugfix releases with several issues corrected in the Exif, LDAP, Phar and iconv handling. It is recommended that you upgrade to either of these releases to correct these issues.

As always, you can download these latest releases either from a mirror on the main downloads page or windows.php.net for the Windows executables.

On the main PHP.net site, they've posted announcements about the release of minor versions of PHP 7.1.x and 5.6.x: 7.1.16 and 5.6.35.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.6.35 [and PHP 7.1.16]. This is a security release. One security bug was fixed in this release. All PHP 5.6 [and 7.1] users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.

The bugfixes included in these releases deal with changes in the FPM handling, ODBC functionality, and Phar building. You can download this latest release from the main downloads page (source) or from the windows.php.net site for the Windows binaries.

The main PHP.net site has posted the announcement(s) of the release of updates for the three supported versions of the language: 7.1.15, 5.6.34 & 7.2.3.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.1.15, 5.6.34 and 7.2.3. This is a security fix release, containing one security fix and many bug fixes. All [PHP] users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.

Fixes include changes to the DateTime handling, LDAP connectivity, Phar construction, PostgreSQL issues and changes to the SPL. You can get these latest versions either from the main downloads page or on windows.php.net for the Windows binaries.

The Kinsta blog has published an article they call the Definitive PHP 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, 72. and HHVM benchmarks providing a comparison between these different versions running different popular PHP software (including WordPress, Drupal and Magento 2).

Each year we try and take a deep dive into performance benchmarks across various platforms and see how different versions of PHP and HHVM stack up against each other. This year we went all out and benchmarked four different PHP engines and HHVM across 20 different platforms/configurations; including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, Laravel, Symfony, and many more. We also tested popular eCommerce solutions such as WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Magento, and PrestaShop.

[...] The results this year have drastically changed from our previous benchmarks where HHVM was the winner. We now are excited to see PHP 7.2 as the leading engine in terms of speed. [...] This is great news for developers and end-users alike as it means more of a focus back on PHP and providing faster websites and web services for everyone.

The post then starts with a look at the system setup (well, Google Cloud instance) that's used for the testing and how it is configured. From there it goes into the test results from each of the different types of software:

• WordPress
• Drupal
• Joomla!
• Magento 2
• Grav CMS
• October CMS
• Laravel
• Symfony
• PyroCMS
• Pagekit
• Bolt
• AnchorCMS
• PrestaShop
• CraftCMS
• ForkCMS

As you can see there's more of a leaning towards content management and e-commerce solutions in their list. It's good to see base frameworks in the list too, however. For each item in the list they provide a graph of the results showing requests per second.

On the [main PHP.net site]http://php.net/() today they've announced the release of new released of all currently supported versions of the language:

• PHP 7.0.27
• PHP 7.2.1
• PHP 7.1.13
• PHP 5.6.33

All of these releases contain similar bugfixes correcting security issues reported in the language including problems in the CLI server, Phar handling, Zip functionality and the Opcache feature. It is suggested to update to these latest versions as soon as possible to prevent issues with these bugs.

As always you can download the source versions of these latest releases from the main downloads page or the Windows binaries from windows.php.net. If you're interested in the changes made, check out the Changelogs for PHP 7 and PHP 5.6.

The PHP.net has announced the release of several new versions of the language including a few bugfix versions for stable releases and the latest Release Candidate for the upcoming PHP 7.2.0. The versions that have been released are:

• PHP 5.6.32
• PHP 7.0.25
• PHP 7.1.11
• PHP 7.2.0 Release Candidate 5

Most of these releases take care of similar bugs found across the different releases with some differences between them. While the others are production releases and it is recommended that you upgrade to those where possible, the Release Candidate is pre-production and should not be considered stable yet.

You can download the stable releases from the downloads page for source or windows.php.net for the Windows binaries. The Release Candidate can be downloaded from the source package QA site or the Windows QA site for the binaries.

The CloudWays blog has posted an article sharing the results from some benchmarking they've done comparing Laravel 5 on PHP 5.6 versus PHP 7.

Laravel is rapidly becoming a popular choice for PHP projects. The framework has established its reputation after the release of version 5.x. In the same vein, PHP recently received a major update in the form of PHP 7.1.x.

It is an established fact that Laravel has a solid codebase and provides optimized performance for all lightweight and enterprise level applications. However no statistics about Laravel 5 benchmarks and its performance with PHP 5.6 and PHP 7 are widely available.

Using the Blitz testing tool and sample Laravel applications managed through CloudWays (on DigitalOcean), they benchmarked mean response times and the "hit rate" of the requested pages. Graphs are included of the results for both PHP 5.6 and PHP 7 and the post ends with a comparison of the results from the two scenarios with PHP 7 coming out on top.

On the Zend Framework blog Matthew Weier O'Phinney has a new post covering the state of the Zend Framework project and how it relates to PHP 7.1.

When we announced Zend Framework 3 last year, one of the changes was setting the minimum supported PHP version to 5.6. Our initial plan was to support 5.6 until it reaches end-of-life, which occurs 31 December 2018.

PHP 5.6, however, stopped receiving active support almost five months ago, on 19 Jan 2017. This means that it is no longer receiving bugfixes, only critical security fixes. As such, a number of contributors have been pushing for us to up our minimum supported version to support only actively supported PHP versions, which would mean only PHP 7 versions.

[...] Our view is that the new features in PHP 7 will allow us to simplify our code dramatically, reduce bugs (primarily by increasing type safety), make our code more easily maintainable (less code required to check types; less repetitive code), provide stronger and more predictable interfaces to our users, and simultaneously provide users access to more and better language features.

He also talks briefly about their thoughts about HHVM support and if it makes sense to keep moving forward with it (given the small percentage of their user base). He then lays out a plan for the framework moving forward that includes the release of PHP 7.1+ only components and security patches on 5.6 versions until end of life.

The PHP.net site has posted an announcement about the latest release in the PHP 5.6.x series: PHP 5.6.30.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.6.30. This is a security release. Several security bugs were fixed in this release. All PHP 5.6 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.

According to our release calendar, this PHP 5.6 version is the last planned release that contains regular bugfixes. All the consequent releases will contain only security-relevant fixes, for the term of two years. PHP 5.6 users that need further bugfixes are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 7.

If you'd like to view the full list of changes, head over to the Changelog for what was fixed and their related bug entries. As always you can download this latest release from the main downloads page for the source release and windows.php.net for the Windows binaries.