The Sound of Symfony podcast has posted their latest episode today - Episode #14: What's new in Symfony 3.1 with hosts Magnus Nordlander and Tobias Nyholm.

The band is back together and this time it's a blast from the past. We revisit the old news segment and do a whole show featuring nothing but news. We're talking Symfony 3.1, PHP 7.1 and the fall conference season.

You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the episode, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter to get the latest updates when new episodes are released.

Now that PHP 7 has been released, it's time to catch up with what this new major version has to offer. In this tutorial from SitePoint you can learn about what the latest features and changes are in this release (including what happened to PHP 6).

PHP 7, the next version of the world’s most popular programming language, has been released. We’d love to shoot fireworks and get drunk with our newfound power (seriously, the language is in the true big leagues now, functionality and performance-wise) but we’re sure the rest of the internet will do this for us. Instead, we’ll focus on compiling a (perpetually up to date) list of resources to get started with version 7 – posts describing what’s new, books helping you kick things off, and more.

The post starts by answering the "what happened to PHP 6?" question, listing a few resources with some more information on the topic. Following this it gets into the "what's new" of PHP 7 including:

• Links to guides to the features themselves
• Tools to help you get a PHP 7 environment set up
• Other PHP 7-related tools

There's also some other miscellaneous things mentioned including the gophp7-ext project trying to get as many extensions PHP 7 compatible and some sources for more "live" help for your questions.

The NetTuts.com site has a new post today sharing some of what's new in Laravel 5, the latest release of the popular PHP framework. Version 5 was announced back on February 5th.

The PHP community has recently been blessed with a new release of one of its most loved frameworks, Laravel. Version 5.0.1 is a major release, so not only are there some great new features available, but the architectural foundations of the framework have also been altered to some extent. So, without any further ado, I am going to dive right into the framework and show you all the good things the latest release has to offer.

He touches on a few of the main differences between version 5 and the previous versions including:

• Differences in directory structure
• How method injection is handled
• The use of contracts (interfaces)
• Route caching and middleware
• Authentication changes
• Events and commands

There's more on his list, each with a description and sometimes a bit of code to help explain the changes. Check out the full post for the remainder of the list and details on those listed above.

In this new post to PHPMaster.com today Alexander Cogneau takes a look at what's different in version four (v4) of the Laravel framework as it has changed from version three.

Laravel is a PHP framework which uses the MVC pattern. Of course, there are many such projects and I'm not going to compare Laravel with other frameworks in this article. Instead, I'm going to share with you what's new in the newest version of Laravel - Laravel 4.

There's a list of things that have changed (each with a summary of what they are):

• Decoupled Components
• Creating a "Normal" Project
• Routes
• Better Code through Testing
• The Container and Its Bindings
• Improved CLI
• New Database Features
• Using Stand-Alone Components

John Mertic has put together a what's new list in the upcoming PHP 5.3 release:

PHP V5.3 is set to be released by the end of 2008, and many of the new features in this release have been in the planning stages for a few years. Originally touted as "PHP V6 without native Unicode support," PHP V5.3 has been developed into a feature-rich upgrade to the PHP V5 line. [...] In this "What's new in PHP V5.3" series, we'll look at these new V5.3 features, and see how they are used and how they can be used in your Web application.

In this first part of the series he talks about:

• Improved static method and member handling
• The _callStatic() magic method
• Dynamic static calls
• Late static binding
• Standard PHP Library
• Circular garbage collection

Cal Evans has pointed out just some of the recent tutorials and articles that have popped up about the Zend Framework in a recent Zend Developer Zone post:

If you are working with Zend Framework, there's no need to struggle with any concept, chances are good that there is help on-line you can tap. Here are two resources that have recently come on-line. I'm sure there are more.

There's two in his list this time - a look at what's new in version 1.5 of the framework and the PHP Everyday site providing fresh PHP-related content each day.