The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.8. This release fixes two issues introduced in the PHP 5.3.7 release:

• Fixed bug #55439 (crypt() returns only the salt for MD5)
• Reverted a change in timeout handling restoring PHP 5.3.6 behavior, which caused mysqlnd SSL connections to hang (Bug #55283).

All PHP users should note that the PHP 5.2 series is NOT supported anymore. All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.3.8.

For a full list of changes in PHP 5.3.8, see the ChangeLog. For source downloads please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/.

For more details on the crypt() blowfish security issue in pre 5.3.6 see the crypt blowfish page

Due to unfortunate issues with 5.3.7 (see bug#55439) users should wait with upgrading until 5.3.8 will be released (expected in few days).

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.7. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.3.x branch with over 90 bug fixes, some of which are security related.

Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.3.7:

• Updated crypt_blowfish to 1.2. (CVE-2011-2483) (more info)
• Fixed crash in error_log(). Reported by Mateusz Kocielski
• Fixed buffer overflow on overlog salt in crypt().
• Fixed bug #54939 (File path injection vulnerability in RFC1867 File upload filename). Reported by Krzysztof Kotowicz. (CVE-2011-2202)
• Fixed stack buffer overflow in socket_connect(). (CVE-2011-1938)
• Fixed bug #54238 (use-after-free in substr_replace()). (CVE-2011-1148)

Key enhancements in PHP 5.3.7 include:

• Upgraded bundled Sqlite3 to version 3.7.7.1
• Upgraded bundled PCRE to version 8.12
• Fixed bug #54910 (Crash when calling call_user_func with unknown function name)
• Fixed bug #54585 (track_errors causes segfault)
• Fixed bug #54262 (Crash when assigning value to a dimension in a non-array)
• Fixed a crash inside dtor for error handling
• Fixed bug #55339 (Segfault with allow_call_time_pass_reference = Off)
• Fixed bug #54935 php_win_err can lead to crash
• Fixed bug #54332 (Crash in zend_mm_check_ptr // Heap corruption)
• Fixed bug #54305 (Crash in gc_remove_zval_from_buffer)
• Fixed bug #54580 (get_browser() segmentation fault when browscap ini directive is set through php_admin_value)
• Fixed bug #54529 (SAPI crashes on apache_config.c:197)
• Fixed bug #54283 (new DatePeriod(NULL) causes crash).
• Fixed bug #54269 (Short exception message buffer causes crash)
• Fixed Bug #54221 (mysqli::get_warnings segfault when used in multi queries)
• Fixed bug #54395 (Phar::mount() crashes when calling with wrong parameters)
• Fixed bug #54384 (Dual iterators, GlobIterator, SplFileObject and SplTempFileObject crash when user-space classes don't call the parent constructor)
• Fixed bug #54292 (Wrong parameter causes crash in SplFileObject::__construct())
• Fixed bug #54291 (Crash iterating DirectoryIterator for dir name starting with \0)
• Fixed bug #54281 (Crash in non-initialized RecursiveIteratorIterator)
• Fixed bug #54623 (Segfault when writing to a persistent socket after closing a copy of the socket)
• Fixed bug #54681 (addGlob() crashes on invalid flags)
• Over 80 other bug fixes.

Windows users: please mind that we do no longer provide builds created with Visual Studio C++ 6. It is impossible to maintain a high quality and safe build of PHP for Windows using this unmaintained compiler.

For Apache SAPIs (php5_apache2_2.dll), be sure that you use a Visual Studio C++ 9 version of Apache. We recommend the Apache builds as provided by ApacheLounge. For any other SAPI (CLI, FastCGI via mod_fcgi, FastCGI with IIS or other FastCGI capable server), everything works as before. Third party extension providers must rebuild their extensions to make them compatible and loadable with the Visual Studio C++9 builds that we now provide.

All PHP users should note that the PHP 5.2 series is NOT supported anymore. All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.3.7.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the first PHP 5.4 alpha release. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviors. Read the NEWS file for a complete list of changes.

THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT PREVIEW - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION!

This alpha release exists to encourage users to identify bugs, and to ensure that all new features and backward compatibility breaks are evaluated and documented before PHP 5.4.0 is released. Please report findings to the QA mailing list and/or the PHP bug tracker. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site.

Here is an incomplete list of changes:

• Added: Traits language construct
• Added: Array dereferencing support
• Added: DTrace support
• Improved: Improved Zend Engine memory usage and performance
• Moved: ext/sqlite moved to pecl (sqlite3 support is still built-in)

Please note that some legacy features have been removed, including:

• Removed: break/continue $var syntax
• Removed: register_globals, allow_call_time_pass_reference, and register_long_arrays ini options
• Removed: session_is_registered(), session_registered(), and session_unregister()

This is the first release that adopts the releaseprocess RFC. The next alpha will be released within four weeks. The PHP 5.4 feature set and API has not been finalized.

PHP has several new documentation features that the community should be aware of:

• pman - PHP man pages
  • $ pear install doc.php.net/pman
  • $ pman strlen (this example displays a local textual version of the strlen docs)
• Enhanced CHM - contains user notes (over 25,000)
  • This additional CHM file is downloadable
• Online Documentation Editor - allows everyone to edit the PHP manual
  • URL: https://edit.php.net/
  • Every manual page will link to it in the future
  • Includes an IRC window to the #php.doc channel, so let's talk

We hope you find the above features useful, and please write [email protected] with feedback. Additional features are being refined, which includes a JSON version of the manual.