PHP 5.3 was released almost a year ago, but very few Drupal developers are familiar with the significant enhancements in this version. In fact, until only recently Drupal was incompatible with PHP 5.3, and to this day there are still many bugs, particularly in contrib. While we can keep pushing off learning the nuances of this new version, we will eventually need to cave in. Almost all Linux distributions and WAMP/XAMP/MAMP bundles will include PHP 5.3 by default, and 5.2 will be phased out soon.
