For those that are interested in how PHP works "under the covers" and maybe want to get started writing your own extensions for it, you should check out the PHP Internals Book. It's a collaborative effort between Julien Pauli, Anthony Ferrara and Nikita Popov.

There are three primary goals of this book: Document and describe how PHP internals work, how to extend the language with extensions, how you can interact with the community to develop PHP itself. This book is primarily targeted at developers who have experience in the C programming language. However, where-ever possible we will attempt to distill the information and summarize it so that developers who don't know C will still be able to understand the content.

The book is a work in progress, but they're off to a good start. They already have sections covering some of the basics of working with classes and objects (including iterators and "magic interfaces").

On the Symfony blog there's a new post mentioning the availability of the static contents of the Symfony site as a public repository.

The Symfony website has always been in English as English is probably the lingua-franca for web developers. But as some sections of the website do not change that frequently (mainly the "What is Symfony?", "Get started", and "About" sections), and because not all developers are comfortable reading English websites, I'm very happy to announce that most of the static contents are now available in a public Git repository.

They've already had people contributing back to the documentation in their own languages including German, Slovak, Czech, Swedish and Polish. Some of them are still works in progress, but they're getting there.

The PHP development group has released the latest Release Candidate for the PHP 5.5 series - Release Candidate 3. This is a development preview, so it's not to be used in production but all testing is appreciated.

To get the full changelog, please, check the NEWS file attached to the archive. For source downloads of PHP 5.5.0RC3 please visit the download page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/qa/. We were pleased if you could test this release candidate against your code base and report any problems that you encounter to the QA mailing list and/or the PHP bug tracker. Thanks you helping us making PHP better.

Bugs fixed in this release include issues causing segfaults, buffer overflows and truncation of data when hashing with hash_pbkdf2.`

On PHP.net today they've announced the release of the latest versions in the PHP 5.3 and 5.4 series - PHP 5.4.16 and PHP 5.3.26.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.16 and PHP 5.3.26. These releases fix about 15 bugs, including CVE-2013-2110. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.16.

You can download these latest release from the usual spots and check out a list of what changed in the Changelog

Adam Culp has posted his own look at some of the PHP usage statistics that are out there and how they can be interpreted.

Every once in awhile I stumble across someone who is trying to find their way and decide what they will do in their career. As the organizer of a PHP user group I see many new developers passing through. Of course I always speak of how strong PHP is in the web markets, and encourage new web developers to pursue PHP as a tool in their box of goodies. Because as a web developer it would be a career limiting move to not have any knowledge of PHP. Here is why...

He shares a few different sources including w3tech's overall and PHP-specific information (PHP5 specific here) and the current results of the TIOBE index showing language popularity. For each he talks some about what the results mean (and don't mean) and how, if you're a "professional developer" you should, at the least, know PHP - the most dominant language in the web space.

Brandon Savage has a new post to his site today showing you how to compile and install PHP 5.5, the next major upcoming release for the language (in RC status as of the time of this post though).

There's always a lag behind new releases of PHP and releases of packages for operating systems such as Ubuntu. This lag time means that you could be kept from upgrading to the latest and greatest PHP for a year or more, unless you use an outside repository like Dotdeb. [...] Instead, I roll my own version of PHP. It's simple and easy to do, and something that any developer can do. Here's my instructions for doing so on a fresh Ubuntu installation.

He gives a reason or two why you might want to "roll your own" installation and helps you get the environment prepared via some "aptitude" install commands for supporting software. Commands are included for installing needed dependencies, configuring/building PHP and updating Apache to use this new install. He finishes it up with a few smaller things to do like making the php.ini and enabling the Zend opcode caching extension.

On the PHP.net site they've announced the release of version 5.4.15 & 5.3.25 (fully released after some propagation issues with the mirror servers).

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.15 and PHP 5.3.25. These releases fix about 10 bugs aswell as upgrading the bundled libmagic library. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.15. [...] The list of changes are recorded in the ChangeLog.

Changes include updates to debug_backtrace for a segfault issue, a change to the dns_get_record function for negative length values and a fix for a fd leak on Solaris. You can download this latest release from the downloads section (source) or the Windows QA site (binaries).

As is mentioned on PHP.net today, the first release candidate for the PHP 5.5.x series, PHP 5.5.0RC1, has been released for testing:

The PHP development team announces the availability of the first release candidate of PHP 5.5. This release fixes some bugs as well as some possible leaks from our last beta. This is a development preview - do not use it in production!

Some of the more major changes in this release include an update to the FPM SAPI for QUERY_STRING, a fix for a build issue with libgd, bugs in SNMP and a problem with stream_select on Windows x64 systems. You can find the full list of changes in the NEWS file. Please download and test (Windows binaries here) this latest release to help the development team find issues and move along with the PHP 5.5.x releases.

On PHPMaster.com there's a new tutorial talking about randomness in PHP, what it is and some of the things it can be used for.

Use of random values is very important in the computer security field. It is crucial in computer programming for development of secure systems that are not vulnerable to malicious subversion. Cryptography relies on random value's generation and their reproducibility for unpredictable output that is core for security of any system. Random values are fundamental for secure coding practices and PHP highly makes use of them for security. You will find them used in all libraries and frameworks and almost all codes rely on them for the generation of tokens, salts and as inputs for further functions.

He talks about the important of good random numbers and some of the common uses for it including generating salts and unique identifiers. He mentions the "pseudorandomness" of PHP's generators and how they're seeded to help increase this randomness. He finishes up the tutorial with some suggestions and language features for creating "as random as possible" values like using "/dev/urandom" on Linux-based systems.

Thomas Buck has put together what he calls "Tom's PHP Commandments" (nine of them) that developers should follow when developing applications with the language. Among his suggestions are things like:

• ALWAYS do the simplest thing that will work
• NEVER trust anything that comes from the user
• NEVER use include for controlling logic
• NEVER create a file of useful functions, even if it's called helpers.php

There's also been some discussion about this list over on Reddit - you can comment on it over there if you agree/disagree with some of his points.