Johannes Schlüter

In my blog post for the 5.3 release I already mentioned it and some others posted it, too: We're planning a release party in Munich, currently we have around 60 people who registered. That's the official announcement:

We like to invite you to the PHP 5.3 release party on Friday, the 17th of July in Munich. The release party offers a chance to talk to other PHP enthusiasts and enjoy that PHP is alive and kicking. If you just can't resist a decent barbecue together with some beer and other drinks you are also welcomed.

The happening will take place at the Waldwirtschaft beer garden irrespective of the weather. We will meet at 19:00 o'clock - open end.
The location is famous for its huge beer garden (2,500 available seats, a children’s playground) and its typical Bavarian but also international food. On sunny weather you may even enjoy live-music and listen to the sounds of Jazz, Blues, Swing or Dixi.

Catering will be provided and as a special delicacy you may enjoy a suckling pig!

If you like to join the event please register at PHPUG-Munich Wiki and follow it for updates.
Alternatively you may register at Facebook as well and follow this for updates.

For any questions please visit IRC channel: #phprp on irc.uni-erlangen.de.


The PHP 5.3. BBQ release party is sponsored by:

   
 

Supporters for the PHP 5.3 BBQ release party are:

• Sun Microsystems
• PHPUG.de

Recently I was debugging some code. That happens. But this code was cluttered with @-operators suppressing error messages. That's annoying. So I wrote a simple extension disabling this operator. That helped.

I then proposed that extension to pecl, while doing that I found out that Gopal has written a similar extension before. After short discussions we added that extension, using the name scream to pecl and released the extension there. Documentation is written and committed and should appear in the PHP documentation within hours.

It's done 5.3 finally, after quite some discussions, reached beta state. So if you're not already on it it's now the perfect time to test it. Problems found now can be fixed before we mark it stable. Issues not find might need workarounds in your software which will cost you more time in the end. Or the way I often put it: Test now and complain or don't test and live with the consequences - we do our best but we certainly can't cover every edge cases especially in a version like 5.3 where we did quite some internal cleanup and added tons of new features.

The NEWS entry file is, compared to some previous alpha versions, quite short this time but still worth reading if you tested a previous alpha release.

Source tarballs can be found in my download directory, Windows builds in the Windows QA area.

Happy testing!

As most of you might have seen we recently announced the first alpha of PHP 5.3.0. The major changes are listed in the announcement. Source tarballs can be found on PHP's downloads site, as it's the first release I packaged I'm especially interested in feedback, whether it works or not . But we didn't only have changes on the source builds: A new team took over the creation of Windows builds. As they also did a major update to the Windows build architecture (supporting newer compiler versions on Windows and added experimental support for 64bit platforms) the build process got a bit delayed but builds should be available soon.

Remember: It's a release we packaged to get feedback from our users. So please test it. If you find issues please report them - the sooner we know about issues the sooner they can be addressed. Although our test coverage increased we can't cover all cases in our tests so please test it now and don't wait for the stable release, once the stable release is out your edge case might trigger a bug on a productive system, bugs reported now can be fixed before we release a final version.

If you want to give back to the PHP project - hey you probably make a living out of software you get for free - and can't fix bugs or assist in a similar way you probably could help our documentation team with improving the documentation, there are a few features without proper documentation, yet.