As is mentioned on PHP.net today, the first release candidate for the PHP 5.5.x series, PHP 5.5.0RC1, has been released for testing:

The PHP development team announces the availability of the first release candidate of PHP 5.5. This release fixes some bugs as well as some possible leaks from our last beta. This is a development preview - do not use it in production!

Some of the more major changes in this release include an update to the FPM SAPI for QUERY_STRING, a fix for a build issue with libgd, bugs in SNMP and a problem with stream_select on Windows x64 systems. You can find the full list of changes in the NEWS file. Please download and test (Windows binaries here) this latest release to help the development team find issues and move along with the PHP 5.5.x releases.

The PHP.net site has posted about the release of PHP 5.5 beta 4, the last beta that will be made for this series.

The PHP development team announces the release of the 4th beta of PHP 5.5.0. This release fixes some bugs against beta 3 and cleans up some features. This is a development preview - do not use it in production.

Several bugs were fixed and changes made - you can read the complete list in the NEWS file. To get this latest beta and try it out with your applications (and run the tests) you can download it here (here for Windows).

On PHP.net they've announced the release of the beta3 for PHP 5.5.x with some bugfixes from the previous beta release.

The PHP development team announces the release of the 3rd beta of PHP 5.5.0. This release fixes some bugs against beta 2. This is a development preview - do not use it in production. PHP 5.5.0beta3 is shipped with some bug fixes and improvements.

Updates include the dropping of bison <2.4 support, a fix for the DateTime serialize/unserialize and an update to the key handling in foreaches. You can see information on these changes and many more in the NEWS file and can download the beta release from the usual sources: source, Windows binaries.

The PHP.net site has announced the release of the latest beta for the PHP 5.5 series - PHP 5.5 beta2:

The PHP development team announces the release of the second beta of PHP 5.5.0. This release fixes some bugs from beta one that could prevent the release from compiling. [...] Our next beta is expected for April 11th.

This is a development preview, so do not use it in production. Several bugs were fixed in this beta release - you can view the NEWS file for a complete list. If you'd like to help test it out in your environment and with your applications, go download it (Winodws) and give it a shot. You can provide issues you might find back to the bug tracker.

Andrew Podner has posted about the password hashing functionality that's coming with PHP 5.5 - how it will work and some of the benefits of its use.

Recently PHP 5.5 was released into beta, which puts us one step closer to another release of PHP. This week, I thought I would spend a little time explaining a new feature that will be implemented in 5.5 that will hopefully make dealing with passwords easier for developers to grasp and properly implement. I cannot tell you the number of apps, even ones written within the last year or so, that I open up only to find either an md5 hash, or worse, clear text password storage. I keep telling myself that eventually this will come to an end, and people will stop taking the easy way out. Maybe PHP 5.5 will have made it so easy that there is simply no further excuse not to implement solid password hashing.

He includes an example of the four new functions that will come with the hashing functionality: password_get_info, password_hash, password_needs_rehash and password_verify. He includes the parameters that should be included in each call and the details from the call to get the hash's info. If you're not going to be able to move up to PHP 5.5 when it's released, you might consider looking into this compatibility library to have a similar interface and functionality (for 5.3.7 or greater).

As is mentioned in this new post to PHP.net today, they've released the latest alpha for the PHP 5.5.x series - PHP 5.5.0alpha6 - for testing. This is not a stable release so do not use it in production by any means.

The PHP development team announces the release of PHP 5.5.0alpha6. This release fixes some bugs from alpha5. It also serves as a delay for our next release, beta1, integrating ZendOptimizer+ OPCode cache which is not ready yet to be merged. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs in the bug tracking system.

Updates in this release include a fix for a bug where uninitialized ++$foo->bar; does not cause a notice, an update to the bundled PCRE 8.32, and a bugfix in ext/sockets where sendmsg/recvmsg shutdown handler causes segfault. You can get the complete list of changes here and get the download over on this site (Windows users here).

Chris Hartjes, a guru of CakePHP knowledge, is putting together a book - "Refactoring Legacy Applications Using CakePHP".

Some of you may know that I have started writing a e-book about CakePHP. I'm planning on publishing it myself for the low, low price of $7. I thought I'd let people take a sneak peek at how it looks so far by publishing the first two chapters in very rough form.

You can find a rough draft here (pdf). Keep an eye out on Chris' blog for more (possible) preview releases and for the final product once its wrapped.

Ian Selby has posted a look at the newly released PHP support by the Aptana software:

Aptana (yes, this is a shameless plug) released version 1.0 of its PHP support yesterday, and it is something that you should definitely check out. Prior to working at Aptana, I was an avid user of Zend Studio, and Coda, simply because those were the best PHP IDEs as far as I was concerned. Over the past few months, however, we've been hard at work on the PHP support for Aptana Studio, and I can say with much confidence that it is in every way as good as every other PHP IDE out there, and better than some in other respects.

He talks about new features like content assist (adding userland code to the automatic completion), completion of functions with parameters already filled in and a PHP preview server and debugger built right in. You can get more information on the Aptana website.

Maxime Bouroumeau-Fuseau sent over a note about a project that's been started to try to port as much of PHP over to Javascript as possible - the Harmony Framework.

Nearly all of php features are already supported and the process is nearly instantaneous! Harmony also comes with Harmony XML, a Flex MXML like language to create components in xml and php.

The homepage even has a converter that you can use to make the PHP->Javascript transition for your own scripts. The framework is still in a Preview stage, but it already looks promising.

The Zend Developer Zone has announced the release of the latest preview of the Zend Framework - the Preview Release for 1.7.

We are excited to announce that the Zend Framework 1.7 Preview Release is now available from the Zend Framework download site! While 1.7PR is not a feature complete release in the 1.7 series, it nevertheless contains some very important features scheduled for the 1.7 production release.

Updates included in this release are things like the Zend_Amf component, an update of the Dojo toolkit, support for the dijit editor, some performance enhancements and other locale and internationalization changes.

You can download this latest release from the Zend Framework download page and be sure to log any problems you find into the issue tracker and help the ZF team make the framework even better.