Drupal 7.61 - the next planned minor release of Drupal 7 - is scheduled for Wednesday, November 7th, 2018. Minor releases include new features, usability improvements, and backwards-compatible API improvements.

The release will feature full compatibility for PHP 7.2 and so far includes the following changes:

- File upload validation functions and hook_file_validate() implementations are
now always passed the correct file URI.
- The default form cache expiration of 6 hours is now configurable (API
addition: https://www.drupal.org/node/2857751).
- Allowed callers of drupal_http_request() to optionally specify an explicit
Host header.
- Allowed the + character to appear in usernames.
- PHP 7.2: Fixed Archive_Tar incompatibility.
- PHP 7.2: Removed deprecated function each().
- PHP 7.2: Avoid count() calls on uncountable variables.
- PHP 7.2: Removed deprecated create_function() call.
- PHP 7.2: Make sure variables are arrays in theme_links().
- Fixed theme-settings.php not being loaded on cached forms

At core committer discretion important bug fixes might be added prior to release and this post will be updated to inform of further changes.

Thanks for your patience,

The Drupal 7 core committer team