On the Symfony Finland blog they've posted a look at Symfony's past, present and future in terms of its structure and goals of stability and flexibility. This also includes some of the origins of PHP itself and how it evolved to the stage where creating framework made sense.

I like to think of modern PHP frameworks as glue to put together components to form something that is more than the sum of it's parts. [...] The Symfony Framework is a standard way (and framework code) to create applications using components. The application is always built with a specific structure, which allows code reuse of complete functionalities (Bundles in Symfony lingo) across projects. If you build using a collection of components, you'll need to invest time in learning how that software has decided to use the available components.

He talks more about the idea of components and how they make up a greater whole (like Symfony) and how they relate to the idea of "bundles". He then looks forward to the future of the framework, its long-term support and its work towards being fully PHP7 compatible.

The combination of the PHP language at 20 years and the Symfony framework at 10 years offers a stable platform with flexibility to adapt and grow in the future.

Fabien Potencier (of the Symfony framework) has a new post to his site talking about a philosophy that the Symfony framework community should work towards, providing stability over features.

Long story short: in the coming months, the Symfony core contributors should focus their efforts toward stabilizing the existing features instead of working on new ones. At this point, backward compatibility and stability are more important than everything else.

He highlights some of the points that come along with this effort including less refactoring for the sake of refactoring, fixing more bugs/edge cases and writing more tests/documentation. He gets into some of the specifics of this kind of thinking and points out the things that can and can't be changed during this time. He talks more about stability and suggests that not only can it help enhance performance but it could also help motivate more projects/corporate users to start using the framework.

The latest version in the PHP 5.2.x series has been released - PHP 5.2.9 - with several bug and stability fixes. From the announcement:

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.9. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 50 bug fixes, several of which are security related.All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

Four security enhancements/fixes are specifically mentioned - a problem with imagerotate, a crash that can happen when extracting zip files, a problem with explode and empty strings and a segfault in json_decode. The full Changelog is here.

You can get the latest download from the downloads page on the PHP.net site (or your favorite mirror).

NOTE: This release has been recalled due to a security bug found involving magic_quotes_gpc.

The latest version in the PHP 5.2.x series has been released today - PHP 5.2.7:

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.7. This release focuses on improving the stability ofthe PHP 5.2.x branch with over 120 bug fixes, several of which are security related. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

These security updates include an update of the PCRE version, fixing an incorrect order with php_value, correcting a possible overflow in memnstr and more. Check out the full Changelog for more information on these updates and improvements. You can download this latest update from the PHP.net website (or your favorite mirror).

Ilia Alshanetsky has officially announced that the latest release candidate for the PHP 5.2.5 series (RC1) has been posted and is ready to test.

This RC includes a fair number of fixes since our last release and predominantly works on improving the stability of the 5.2 tree as well as including a small number of minor security fixes. I'd like to ask everyone to test this release against your code and setups, we are aiming for a quick release cycle and user feedback is critical for a successful release.

You can download this latest version here.

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