Recently PHP 5.4.0 Alpha 1 was released and the PHP development team is asking every PHP user to test it. In this blog I have some articles about upcoming features in that version. Now is a good time to test 5.4 in combination with your applications spot mistakes (complain now if we break compatibility, now we could fix it ...) and a good time to prepare your knowledge.

These are the articles I published here:

• Mind the encoding
• Improved interactive shell
• Jason, let me help you
• Array dereferencing
• No more extension for SQLite 2
• Upload progress

I also have articles on a feature which does not make that release:

• Scalar type hints in PHP trunk
• More on scalar type hints in PHP

I plan to continue that series, focusing on things which might be overseen easily. It's a bit time till 5.4 will be released as GA but the more you test it and give feedback the better it will be! :-)