The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.45. Ten security-related issues were fixed in this release. All PHP 5.4 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.

For source downloads of PHP 5.4.45 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes is recorded in the ChangeLog.

Please note that according to the PHP version support timelines, PHP 5.4.45 is the last scheduled release of PHP 5.4 branch. There may be additional release if we discover important security issues that warrant it, otherwise this release will be the final one in the PHP 5.4 branch. If your PHP installation is based on PHP 5.4, it may be a good time to start making the plans for the upgrade to PHP 5.5 or PHP 5.6.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.5.29. This is a security release. Many security-related issues were fixed in this release. All PHP 5.5 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.

For source downloads of PHP 5.5.29 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes is recorded in the ChangeLog.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.6.13. 11 security-related issues were fixed in this release. All PHP 5.6 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.

For source downloads of PHP 5.6.13 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes is recorded in the ChangeLog.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.0.0 RC 2. This is the seventh pre-release of the new PHP 7 major series. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system.

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

PHP 7.0.0 RC 2 contains fixes for 28 reported bugs, 7 of which are security related, and altogether over 250 commits with various improvements.

PHP 7.0.0 comes with new version of the Zend Engine with features such as (incomplete list):

• Improved performance: PHP 7 is up to twice as fast as PHP 5.6
• Consistent 64-bit support
• Many fatal errors are now Exceptions
• Removal of old and unsupported SAPIs and extensions
• The null coalescing operator (??)
• Combined comparison Operator (<=>)
• Return Type Declarations
• Scalar Type Declarations
• Anonymous Classes

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.

For source downloads of PHP 7.0.0 RC 2 please visit the download page, Windows source and binaries can be found on windows.php.net/qa/.

The next release will be RC 3, which is to be released on the 17th of September. You can also read the full list of planned releases on our wiki.

Thank you for helping us make PHP better.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.0.0 RC 1. This is the sixth pre-release of the new PHP 7 major series. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system.

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

PHP 7.0.0 RC 1 contains fixes for 27 reported bugs, and altogether over 200 commits with various stability improvements for database, array, assert, streams and other functionality.

PHP 7.0.0 comes with new version of the Zend Engine with features such as (incomplete list):

• Improved performance: PHP 7 is up to twice as fast as PHP 5.6
• Consistent 64-bit support
• Many fatal errors are now Exceptions
• Removal of old and unsupported SAPIs and extensions
• The null coalescing operator (??)
• Combined comparison Operator (<=>)
• Return Type Declarations
• Scalar Type Declarations
• Anonymous Classes

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.

For source downloads of PHP 7.0.0 RC 1 please visit the download page, Windows source and binaries can be found on windows.php.net/qa/.

The next release will be RC 2, which is to be released on the 3rd of September. You can also read the full list of planned releases on our wiki.

Thank you for helping us make PHP better.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.6.12. 12 security-related issues were fixed in this release. All PHP 5.6 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.

For source downloads of PHP 5.6.12 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes is recorded in the ChangeLog.

The PHP web team are delighted to announce the launch of the new web theme that has been in beta for many months. Lots of hard work has gone into this release and we will be continually improving things over time now that we have migrated away from the legacy theme.

From an aesthetics point of view the general color scheme of the website has been lightened from the older dark purple. Lots of borders and links use a similar purple color to attain consistency. Fonts are smoother, and colors, contrast and highlighting have significantly improved; especially on function reference pages. Code examples should now be much more readable.

The theme is marked up using HTML5 and is generally much more modern. We are using Google Fonts and Bootstrap for our theme base.

To provide valuable feedback, you can use the 'Feedback' widget on the side of the page (not visible on smartphones) and to report bugs, you can make use of the bugs.php.net tracker. Despite our extensive multi-device/multi-browser testing, we may have missed something. So, if you spot any issues please do get in touch.

Special thanks to the guys who helped make this happen, you know who you are!

We are continuing to work through the repercussions of the php.net malware issue described in a news post earlier today. As part of this, the php.net systems team have audited every server operated by php.net, and have found that two servers were compromised: the server which hosted the www.php.net, static.php.net and git.php.net domains, and was previously suspected based on the JavaScript malware, and the server hosting bugs.php.net. The method by which these servers were compromised is unknown at this time.

All affected services have been migrated off those servers. We have verified that our Git repository was not compromised, and it remains in read only mode as services are brought back up in full.

As it's possible that the attackers may have accessed the private key of the php.net SSL certificate, we have revoked it immediately. We are in the process of getting a new certificate, and expect to restore access to php.net sites that require SSL (including bugs.php.net and wiki.php.net) in the next few hours.

To summarise, the situation right now is that:

• JavaScript malware was served to a small percentage of php.net users from the 22nd to the 24th of October 2013.
• Neither the source tarball downloads nor the Git repository were modified or compromised.
• Two php.net servers were compromised, and have been removed from service. All services have been migrated to new, secure servers.
• SSL access to php.net Web sites is temporarily unavailable until a new SSL certificate is issued and installed on the servers that need it.

Over the next few days, we will be taking further action:

• php.net users will have their passwords reset. Note that users of PHP are unaffected by this: this is solely for people committing code to projects hosted on svn.php.net or git.php.net.

We will provide a full post mortem in due course, most likely next week. You can also get updates from the official php.net Twitter: @official_php.

On 24 Oct 2013 06:15:39 +0000 Google started saying www.php.net was hosting malware. The Google Webmaster Tools were initially quite delayed in showing the reason why and when they did it looked a lot like a false positive because we had some minified/obfuscated javascript being dynamically injected into userprefs.js. This looked suspicious to us as well, but it was actually written to do exactly that so we were quite certain it was a false positive, but we kept digging.

It turned out that by combing through the access logs for static.php.net it was periodically serving up userprefs.js with the wrong content length and then reverting back to the right size after a few minutes. This is due to an rsync cron job. So the file was being modified locally and reverted. Google's crawler caught one of these small windows where the wrong file was being served, but of course, when we looked at it manually it looked fine. So more confusion.

We are still investigating how someone caused that file to be changed, but in the meantime we have migrated www/static to new clean servers. The highest priority is obviously the source code integrity and after a quick:

git fsck --no-reflog --full --strict

on all our repos plus manually checking the md5sums of the PHP distribution files we see no evidence that the PHP code has been compromised. We have a mirror of our git repos on github.com and we will manually check git commits as well and have a full post-mortem on the intrusion when we have a clearer picture of what happened.