After an extremely long (IMO) release cycle the final version of PHP 5.2.0 was finally released yesterday morning. There are many new features, speed improvements and a fair number of security changes. You can read the official release announcement for a quick summary of the major changes and the specifics can be found in a very long and somewhat boring to read changelog ;-) The bottom line is that all users of PHP 5.x should definitely upgrade and for 4.x users need to seriously start thinking about migrating as well, since we've finally got a 5 release that not only is feature complete but is also faster or at the minimum performs at the same speed as PHP 4.4. Big thanks to all the contributors who made patches, reported bugs and ran tests to hopefully make a solid release.

The slides for the Caching Systems talk are now available online, they can be downloaded here.

The slides from my talk on PHP Security are now up and can be found in PDF form at the bottom on my talks page. The talk was unfortunately rather short and I had to rush through a number of things, so my apologies if things felt a bit rushed, but I think the key points were hit and as far as an overall overview it was pretty good. Those interested in hearing more about security can review my slides from previous conferences that go into a bit more detail as far as the various security issues.

The slides from the PHP & Performance tutorial I've given during the Zend's PHP Conference are now up, you can find them at the bottom of my talks page here. To all the people who have gotten up really early in the morning, thanks for attending and hopefully you've found something interesting for yourself during the talk. [b]Update:[/b] Rasmus has kindly pointed out that stripping while drastically reducing the size (basic binary is about 3x smaller), does not actually impact the startup speed in any measurable speed. A quick test with php-cgi from latest CVS appears to confirm this, so unless you want to save disk space at expense of debug symbols, do not strip! Thanks Rasmus.

As you may know PHP 5.2.0 will feature a very capable filtering extension that can be used to easily validate your input via a number of rules which you can find here. What I am interested in hearing is are there any other common types of data collected by PHP forms that would be worth while adding filters for into the extension. My own suggestions would be the phone (US/EU formats) and postal/zip code validators. So let's hear what you have to say ;-) Brief Disclaimer: Consider this an RFC of sorts, the suggestions if widely supported may not get integrated and any additions will need to have the implicit agreement of all the filter extension developers before being added.