The PHP team is once again proud to participate in the Google Summer of Code. Ten students will "flip bits instead of burgers" this summer:

• Zend LLVM Extension by Joonas Govenius, mentored by Nuno Lopes
• PHP Optimizer by Samuel Graham Kelly IV, mentored by Derick Rethans
• PhD (PHP Docbook) Project by Rudy Nappée, mentored by Hannes Magnusson
• Replace auto* with CMake by Alejandro Leiva Rojas, mentored by Pierre A. Joye
• gsoc:2008 - XDebug by Chung-Yang Lee, mentored by David Coallier
• Rewrite the run-tests.php script by Cesar Montedonico, mentored by Travis Swicegood
• PHP Bindings for Cairo by Akshat Gupta, mentored by Anant Narayanan
• Algorithm Optimizations by Michal Dziemianko, mentored by Scott MacVicar
• PECL, Website Improvements by Barry Carlyon, mentored by Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson
• Implement Unicode into PHP 6 by Henrique do Nascimento Angelo, mentored by Scott MacVicar

Update (May 11th): Unfortunately Nicholas Sloan had to drop out of the program, but he will be replaced by Rudy Nappée working on the same application.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediateavailability of PHP 5.2.6. 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.

Further details about the PHP 5.2.6 release can be found in the release announcement for 5.2.6, the full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog for PHP 5.

Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.2.6:

• Fixed possible stack buffer overflow in the FastCGI SAPI identified by Andrei Nigmatulin.
• Fixed integer overflow in printf() identified by Maksymilian Aciemowicz.
• Fixed security issue detailed in CVE-2008-0599 identified by Ryan Permeh.
• Fixed a safe_mode bypass in cURL identified by Maksymilian Arciemowicz.
• Properly address incomplete multibyte chars inside escapeshellcmd() identified by Stefan Esser.
• Upgraded bundled PCRE to version 7.6

Update (May 6th): The Windows installers were missing the XSL and IMAP extensions.

Update (May 3rd): The Windows archives were missing the XSL and IMAP extensions.

The PHP-QA team would like to announce the TestFest for the month of May 2008. The TestFest is an event that aims at improving the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. As part of this event, local User Groups (UG) are invited to join the TestFest. These UGs can meet physically or come together virtually. The point however is that people network to learn together. Aside from being an opportunity for all of you to make friends with like minded people in your (virtual) community, it also will hopefully reduce the work load for the PHP.net mentors.

All it takes is someone to organize a UG to spearhead the event and to get others involved in writing phpt tests. The submissions will then be reviewed by members of php.net before getting included in the official test suite. Please visit the TestFest homepage to get additional details on the TestFest on how to get involved, either as a UG or by setting up the necessary infrastructure.

Once again we are glad to announce that we have been accepted to be a Google Summer of Code project. See our program for this year's GSoC.

We would like to take this opportunity to say thanks to Google Inc. for this privilege to participate once again, and would like to invite everyone to look at our list of ideas: http://wiki.php.net/gsoc/2008. Students are of course more than welcome to come up with their own ideas for their proposals and we will consider each and every application that we will receive.

So once again, thanks to everyone who is involved in this magnificent journey and we hope to see many of you great students and open source passionate join us in our most enjoyable Google Summer of Code projects.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 4.4.8. It continues to improve the security and the stability of the 4.4 branch and all users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to it as soon as possible. This release wraps up all the outstanding patches for the PHP 4.4 series, and is therefore the last normal PHP 4.4 release. If necessary, releases to address security issues could be made until 2008-08-08.

Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 4.4.8:

• Improved fix for MOPB-02-2007.
• Fixed an integer overflow inside chunk_split(). Identified by Gerhard Wagner.
• Fixed integer overlow in str[c]spn().
• Fixed regression in glob when open_basedir is on introduced by #41655 fix.
• Fixed money_format() not to accept multiple %i or %n tokens.
• Added "max_input_nesting_level" php.ini option to limit nesting level of input variables. Fix for MOPB-03-2007.
• Fixed INFILE LOCAL option handling with MySQL - now not allowed when open_basedir or safe_mode is active.
• Fixed session.save_path and error_log values to be checked against open_basedir and safe_mode (CVE-2007-3378).

For a full list of changes in PHP 4.4.8, see the ChangeLog.