PHP moves fast nowadays. Drupal has taken the bold move of requiring PHP 5.4.2 for Drupal 8, which is newer than many shared hosts provide, and also newer than the version of PHP many Linux distributions package in their current stable versions.

Yet, even given that bold move, PHP 5.4 is two years old. PHP 5.5 has been out for a year. PHP 5.6 will be released within weeks, and when it is, PHP 5.4 will enter a security fix only sunset phase. 5.5 and 5.6 have many new features worth upgrading for, but how can you track them?

In this talk, I'll work through and demonstrate a number of potential approaches for tracking stable and development versions of PHP in development, staging, testing and production environments without losing too much blood. I'll also touch on best practices for testing code across PHP branches, and managing non-bundled extensions.