As is mentioned in this new post on the PHP.net site, the first release candidate of the PHP 7.2.0 pre-release cycle has been officially released: PHP 7.2.0 RC1.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.2.0 Release Candidate 1. This release is the first 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.

Changes in this release include updates in the GD image handling, PCRE's UTF-8 handling, SQLite driver update, a CURL issue wth OpenSSL detection and Internationalization changes. You can download this pre-production release from either the source download site or the Windows QA site for the Windows binaries.

On the Zend Developer Zone Matthew Weier O'Phinney has posted an announcement about the release of the first Release Candidate for Expressive, version 1.0.0RC1. It builds on top of the zend-stratigility component of the Zend Framework.

Today, we are pleased to announce the immediate availability of the first release candidate of Expressive, a [PSR-7](http://www.php-fig.org/psr/psr-7/) [middleware](https://github.com/zendframework/zend-stratigility/blob/master/doc/book/middleware.md) microframework.

Expressive allows you to write PSR-7 middleware applications for the web. PSR-7 is a standard defining HTTP message interfaces; these are the incoming request and outgoing response for your application. By using PSR-7, we ensure that your applications will work in other PSR-7 contexts.

The post gives a brief introduction to the framework and lists some of its main features including:

• customizable routing choice (select from several packages, not just forced into one)
• implements the ContainerInterface for dependency injection handling
• allows for the integration of several types of templating tools (Plates, Twig, etc)
• customizable error handling (defaults to a template-based version)

He then walks you through getting started with the framework and creating a simple project. The setup prompts you and walks you through several choices of other packages to install (a router, a template library, etc) and hooks them all together. Once the installation is complete, all it takes is a simple web server start (PHP's own built-in works fine) and you'll have a fully functional application to work with. You can find out more information about the framework through the quickstart and full documentation.

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.

On the PHP.net site today they've announced the release of the latest Release Candidate in the PHP 5.4 series - PHP 5.4 RC1.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the first release candidate of PHP 5.4. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviours. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site. [...] This is the first release candidate. No new features will be included before the final version of PHP 5.4.0. The release candidate phase is intended as a period of bug fixing prior to the stable release.

Major changes include class member access on instantiation, array to string conversion now throws a notice and bugs fixes/improvements to Core and other extensions. For a complete list, check out the NEWS file. Download this latest release

DynamicWebPages.de has a quick post about the latest release for the PHP 4.4.x series today - the release canidate for PHP 4.4.4RC1.

Derick Rethans, the release manager for the version 4 series of PHP, posted the latest release candidate for PHP 4.4.4 for testing. This RC fixes some of the same security issues that lead to the first release candidate for PHP 5.1.5 being created.

Of course, all of the changes can be found in the Changelog for the update and the downloads are here: source, Windows binaries.

DynamicWebPages.de has a quick post about the latest release for the PHP 4.4.x series today - the release canidate for PHP 4.4.4RC1.

Derick Rethans, the release manager for the version 4 series of PHP, posted the latest release candidate for PHP 4.4.4 for testing. This RC fixes some of the same security issues that lead to the first release candidate for PHP 5.1.5 being created.

Of course, all of the changes can be found in the Changelog for the update and the downloads are here: source, Windows binaries.