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.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.5. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 60 bug fixes, several of which are security related. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

Further details about the PHP 5.2.5 release can be found in the release announcement for 5.2.5, the full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog for PHP 5.

Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.2.5:

• Fixed dl() to only accept filenames. Reported by Laurent Gaffie.
• Fixed dl() to limit argument size to MAXPATHLEN (CVE-2007-4887). Reported by Laurent Gaffie.
• Fixed htmlentities/htmlspecialchars not to accept partial multibyte sequences. Reported by Rasmus Lerdorf
• Fixed possible triggering of buffer overflows inside glibc implementations of the fnmatch(), setlocale() and glob() functions. Reported by Laurent Gaffie.
• Fixed "mail.force_extra_parameters" php.ini directive not to be modifiable in .htaccess due to the security implications. Reported by SecurityReason.
• Fixed bug #42869 (automatic session id insertion adds sessions id to non-local forms).
• Fixed bug #41561 (Values set with php_admin_* in httpd.conf can be overwritten with ini_set()).

For users upgrading to PHP 5.2 from PHP 5.0 and PHP 5.1, an upgrade guide is available here, detailing the changes between those releases and PHP 5.2.5.

The PHP documentation team is pleased to announce the initial release of the new build system that generates the PHP Manual. Written in PHP, PhD ([PH]P based [D]ocBook renderer) builds are now available for viewing at docs.php.net. Everyone is encouraged to test and use this system so that bugs will be found and squashed.

Once the new build system is stable, expect additional changes to the PHP manual that will include an improved navigation system and styling for OOP documentation.

Feel free to set this developmental mirror as your default by using my.php.