PHP 6 is nearing completion – so this talk will give an overview of the new features. While the talk will have a focus on the needs of MySQL users, we will go over all major additions. Without a doubt, the most prominent change in PHP 6 is native Unicode support across all of PHP and its bundled extensions. However, there are other important changes like improvements to OO model and other new syntax features. PHP 6 will also feature an entirely new way to interact with MySQL databases specifically written for PHP from the ground up. As common with new major versions, some past “mistakes” will get cleaned up that users need to prepare themselves for. Finally, we will look at some of the new features that were introduced in some of the recent PHP 5 versions that will have matured to a stable level by the point PHP 6 is released.