Remember, this is a release candidate intended for testing only. Use in a production system is not without risks.
XOOPS 2.5.9 RC3 fixes some important issues reported during the testing period for RC2. XOOPS 2.5.9 is currently feature frozen. With a release candidate status, only bug fixes will be considered, and enhancement requests will be accepted, but not acted on at this point. If we have no release blocking bugs reported on RC3, it will become the production ready release.
In the spirit of full disclosure and our "eating our own dogfood attitude," we should mention that the xoops.org site is currently running the RC3 code under PHP 7.1, and fully SSL
Awesome job, Richard!!!! Thanks to your hard work, this will be definitely the best and most solid XOOPS release ever! :-)