With the recent announcement that PHP 6 development has been halted, I'm confused as to what the PHP 5.x and 6.x road map includes.
The current version of PHP is 5.3.2.
There were quite a few significant features to come in PHP 6.0, such as:
Question: What is the new road map of PHP given 6.0 has been canceled? What major features will be available next and in what release?
Features:
No firm date has been set. Anything you read is purely conjecture.
You may want to read Future of PHP 6. PHP6 has somewhat stalled, particularly on the Unicode issues. Just to set the level of your expectations, people have been discussing PHP6 since at least 2006.
Here's an article I read recently on the matter: Resetting PHP 6
It goes into some detail the cause of the delay.
Horizontal code reuse!
Actually, I'm surprised it's not mentioned yet, it's the biggest feature IMO. Basically, it's a way to ease code reuse, by adding methods to classes without inheriting from another class. It's similar to multiple inheritance, but avoids the diamond problem.
The recent release of PHP 5.3 included most of what was originally desirable about PHP6. At last year's Zendcon there was a presentation titled "State of PHP 6", you can see the slides of this presentation here: http://zmievski.org/files/talks/zendcon-2009/php-code-ideas-people.pdf
Unicode branch is on hold for now. Nobody knows what happens with it yet, until there's a good plan how to proceed. The trunk branch - probably to be named 5.4 (or, less probably, 6) - is being actively developed, is to feature significant performance improvements, traits (already in) and some other goodies you can find on http://wiki.php.net/rfc/ or directly from the SVN NEWS file. It would probably be released reasonably soon, but no set dates yet.
P.S. "active development" also means "don't rely on anything you see there too much yet unless you are ready for big changes without notice". Consider yourself warned :)