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

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 JoonasGovenius, mentored by NunoLopes PHP Optimizer by SamuelGraham Kelly IV, mentored by DerickRethans PhD Improvements and Updates by NicholasSloan, mentored by HannesMagnusson Replace auto* with CMake by Alejandro LeivaRojas, mentored by Pierre A.Joye gsoc:2008 - XDebug by Chung-YangLee, mentored by DavidCoallier Rewrite the run-tests.php script by CesarMontedonico, mentored by TravisSwicegood PHP Bindings for Cairo by AkshatGupta, mentored by AnantNarayanan Algorithm Optimizations by MichalDziemianko, mentored by ScottMacVicar PECL, Website Improvements by BarryCarlyon, mentored by Helgi ÞormarÞorbjörnsson Implement Unicode into PHP 6 by Henrique do NascimentoAngelo, mentored by ScottMacVicar

Version 1.8.0 of Apache Cactus has been released. For details of new features and fixes, please see the cactus web site. Download Cactus.

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.