On the PHP.net site they've posted the announcement about the release of the latest Release Candidate for the upcoming PHP 7.3.x series: PHP 7.3.0RC4

The PHP team is glad to announce the next PHP 7.3.0 pre-release, PHP 7.3.0RC4. The rough outline of the PHP 7.3 release cycle is specified in the PHP Wiki.

[...] 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. Internal changes are listed in the UPGRADING.INTERNALS file. These files can also be found in the release archive.

As always, testing of this preview release (not intended for use in production) is appreciated and any bugs found should be reported. The source download can be grabbed from this download page and the Windows binaries are over on the Windows QA site.

On the Zen of Coding site they've posted a look forward at versions of several popular frameworks coming in 2018. Their list includes Phalcon 3, Symfony 4 and Laravel 5.x.

It’s that time of the year again, when we take a look at the world of PHP MVC frameworks. We get ready for the trends of 2018 and plan our roadmaps. Also, we’ll take a quick detour to look at some seagues in the areas beyond PHP MVC.

Web development changes year over year, if not faster. MVC has been a revolutionary paradigm for modern web apps. It helped millions of developers build awesome applications and launch exciting startups.

The post includes a Google Trends chart showing the popularity of searches for various frameworks with Laravel, Symfony and CodeIgniter taking the top three spots overall. It then starts with a high level view of some of the recent changes and trends in several of the frameworks, moving into more detail for each (and some of "the rest" including CakePHP, Zend Framework and Yii. It then discusses microservices, how they relate to MVC and the continuing importance of backend functionality.

The Zend Framework blog has posted a preview of Expressive v3, the next major release of their lightweight framework based on its larger sibling, Zend Framework.

Last week, the PSR-15 working group voted to start its review phase. PSR-15 seeks to standardize server-side request handlers and middleware, and both Stratigility and Expressive have been implementing draft specifications since their version 2 releases. Entering the review phase is an important moment: it means that the working group feels the specification is stable and ready for adoption. If, after the review period is over, no major changes are required, the specification can be presented to the PHP-FIG core committed for a final acceptance vote, at which point it will be frozen and ready for mass adoption.

Our plan is to have Stratigility and Expressive follow the new specification in its final form. To that end, we have been executing on a plan to prepare all our projects that work with PSR-15 to adopt the latest round of changes.

That work is ready today!

The post starts by talking about what changes come along with the PSR-15 specification including changes in namespacing, interfaces being renamed and a package split. It then talks about what changes they've made based on the PSR-15 updates and how you can test your own project to ensure it will be compatible with the updates. This includes changes that will be required to upgrade as the PSR-15 changes are not backwards compatible.

On the Medium.com site today Laravel project lead and creator Taylor Otwell has posted about a feature coming in the 5.6 release of the Laravel framework: single server scheduling.

Today Laurence Ioannou, founder of the Laravel monitoring application Eyewitness.io, contributed a great new feature to Laravel 5.6 (February 2018 release): single server scheduling.

He illustrates the new feature by first defining a new "inspire" job, making it run hourly with the artisan command and not overlap with a previous execution. While this works with a simple server, it doesn't scale to multiple - that's where the "single server scheduling" comes in. The addition of this support provides a new onOneServer option that prevents the job from running elsewhere. It makes use of Redis or Memcache to store the information about which server it is running on so that will need to be enabled to use this feature.

On the main PHP.net site they've posted the announcement about the release of the latest (and last) Release Candidate of the next major version of the PHP language: PHP 7.2.0 RC6.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.2.0 RC6. This release is the sixth Release Candidate for 7.2.0. Barring any surprises, we expect this to be the FINAL release candidate, with Nov 30th's GA release being not-substantially different. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system.

This development preview release includes changes to GD image handling, SOAP functionality and core bugfixes. You can download this latest release for testing with your own applications either via the source QA site or the Windows QA site for the Windows executable.

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.

The main PHP.net page has posted an announcement about the latest Release Candidate in the PHP 7.1.x series being tagged and released: PHP 7.1.0 Release Candidate 5:

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.1.0 Release Candidate 5. This release is the fifth release candidate for 7.1.0. 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.

As a reminder, this is a release candidate and is not to be used in production. You can download and test out this latest release from the PHP.net source QA site or the Windows QA site for the binaries. The next release candidate for this version will be released on November 10th with a goal of a final release following that.

The PHP.net site has posted an official announcement about the release of the latest Release Candidate in the PHP 7.1.x series: PHP 7.1.0 Release Candidate 4:

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.1.0 Release Candidate 4. This release is the fourth release candidate for 7.1.0. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system. [...] The fifth release candidate will be released on the 27th of October. You can also read the full list of planned releases on [our wiki](https://wiki.php.net/todo/php71).

As usually for Release Candidates you can grab the latest test build from this QA site (for source) and the windows.php.net QA site for the binaries. You can find out more about what's changed in this RC in the NEWS file and start walking through the upgrade to PHP 7.1.0 when it's released using the upgrade guide.

Reminder, this is a development preview not a stable release so do not use it in production!

The php.net site has posted an announcement about the latest Release Candidate for the PHP 7.1.x series: PHP 7.1.0 RC 3:

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.1.0 Release Candidate 3. This release is the third release candidate for 7.1.0. 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.

As a reminder, this is a preview release and is NOT designed to be used in production . The release schedule is provided on the wiki, the next Release Candidate will be coming in early October (the 10th) with three more following. The target release date for PHP 7.1.0 is sometime in the later part of November.