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November 21, 2013

Protect your PHP code with SourceGuardian
Welcome, PHP fans, to this week's newsletter.

The PHP Development Team have announced several new releases this week, with PHP 5.5.6 and 5.4.22 now available.

After this year's successful International PHP Conference, next year's has just been announced for June in Berlin.

Also, at this year's DevBeat Conference the Father and Creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, gave a candid interview about how he developed the language and what his future holds.

All this and much, much more from phpweekly.com.

Have a fabulous weekend!

Cheers
Katie

Articles

Why The Father of PHP Doesn't Like Programming
In an Ask me Anything (AMA) session at the DevBeat conference, developers asked PHP creator Rasmus Lerdoff a series of tough questions about how he developed the language and what his future holds.

Becoming a PHP Professional: The Missing Link
When reading various PHP related blogs, Quora questions, Google+ communities, newsletters and magazines, I often notice extreme polarisation of skill. Questions are either at the "How do I connect to a MySQL database?" level or something in the range of "How do I best scale my mailing system to send over one million emails per hour without introducing a new server?" I personally distinguish between 4 distinct levels of PHP prowess (likely applicable to any language/profession): beginner, intermediate, professional and elite.

A Peek at Aura v2 - Aura.Router
Paul M.Jones has been going over the migration of v2 packages from v1. Here he talks about the updated Aura.Router v2 package. While not an example of extracting a new package from an existing one, it has a couple of features that other routers don’t currently have, in addition to being truly independent and completely decoupled from any other package.

Tutorials and Talks

Magic Quotes and PHP: Parsing Escaped Data
Tom McFarlin writes - As far as building projects on or for WordPress is concerned, one of the things that we have to keep in mind is the minimum version of PHP required to run WordPress itself. At the time of this writing, the minimum required version is 5.2.4. Of course, if you know your project is going to run on a newer version of PHP and you have control over that environment, then obviously you have the freedom to write code against that version; however, if you’re building something that’s going to be used across the board for any of the many hosting environments, then you’ve got to take that into consideration.

10 Cool Things You Can Do With Your functions.php Files
Many designers don’t use it much because it is more intimidating in terms of code, but the functions.php file might just be the most powerful theme file in WordPress. Let’s take a look at some of the possibilities it offers.

Building a Sensor Phalanx with PHP
Sensors are fun. They report from the physical world into the digital. But getting the signal into php is only the first part, you will have to get them out again. This post shows how to get data from analog sensors pushed to the browser.

Authentication With Laravel 4
Authentication is required for virtually any type of web application. In this tutorial, I’d like to show you how you can go about creating a small authentication application using Laravel 4. We’ll start from the very beginning by creating our Laravel app using composer, creating the database, loading in the Twitter Bootstrap, creating a main layout, registering users, logging in and out and protecting routes using filters. We’ve got a lot of code to cover, so let’s get started!

Easy Wins For More Performant PHP
Making your website more performant can require a lot of layers. From setting up a reverse-proxy cache with Varnish to configuring a group of load balancers, there are many well-documented options. What if you're just starting out? What if you have a smaller application? Are there things you can do now that will make a difference? This article will explore easy wins for more performant PHP you can implement either as standard practices for your development team or principles you can retrofit for an existing application.

Social Network Style Posting with PHP, MongoDB and jQuery – Part 2
In the previous part of the series, we explained the database architecture, post stream design and application flow required for developing our post mechanism wherein the user will be able to post a status, like/unlike other people's statuses and comment on them. This part of the series will drive you through the coding required to implement these functionalities. We will use the application flow and database structure as discussed in the last article.

Localising JavaScript Strings in a PHP MVC Framework
Roland Clemenceau shows you how to efficiently localise your Javascript strings within your PHP Framework. There are actually several methods to localise Javascript strings in a PHP environment. Technically speaking it is possible to duplicate your Javascript file, naming it after the target language and loading the needed version each time the user selects a new language on site. But this surely represents a method that one could hardly call good practice, even though it would ‘work’. There is also the possibility to have your literal strings directly called by means of PHP variables embedded within your JavaScript code, but depending on your framework architecture, this is not always an option that’s available. This tutorial shows you a method that will work for sure and be easy to maintain.

Processing Data with PHP Using STDIN and Piping
Greg Freeman writes - PHP streams are still lacking in documentation and are rarely used compared to other PHP features. This is a shame because they can be really powerful and I have used them to gain a lot of performance when doing things such as processing log files. One of the more powerful features of Linux is the ability to pipe in data from another program. It’s often faster to offload tasks to an existing linux user space program than to do it in PHP and the added benefit is that you gain multi core processing which is not possible with standard PHP.

Introduction to Scaling PHP Applications – Part 1
This is the first blog in a two-part series on scaling PHP applications. Part one will focus on replacing Apache while part two will go into more advanced topics.
News and Announcements

PHP 5.5.6 Is Now Available
The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.5.6. This release fixes some bugs against PHP 5.5.5 and adds some performance improvements.

PHP 5.4.22 Has Been Released
The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.22. About 10 bugs were fixed. All PHP 5.4 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.

PHP Johannesburg 2014
Following on from a very successful 1st PHP Conference in Cape Town, we are now breaking ground for Johannesburg`s inaugural conference. Johannesburg will be host to Africa`s Biggest PHP Conference on the continent on April 4th & 5th 2014. With over 200 delegates attending, the two day event is hosting some of the Continents most influential people in their field, with delegates flying in from as far afield as Ethiopia, Nigeria, Kenya and ROW.

Nomad PHP - December 19th 2013 20:00 CDT (03:00 CET December 20th)
Sara Golemon presents Scaling PHP With HipHop. HipHop is the Open Source PHP language compiler and runtime designed and used by Facebook. HipHop offers a significant speed improvement over the official PHP runtime and supports most of its core features. This session will provide an introduction to how and why to use HipHop over PHP and the benefits it offers.

International PHP Conference June 1-4th 2014, Berlin
The International PHP Conference is a globally recognised event for  PHP developers, webworkers, IT managers and everyone interested in web-technology. Once again, the conference will explore key topics and core technologies for developers and decision makers.

Reading and Viewing

Lately in PHP Podcast Episode #41 - What Happened in the Security Attack to php.net?
As you may be aware, the PHP.net site was the target of security attack that made it spread malware for a while. The circumstances of this attack were the main topic of discussion between Manuel Lemos, Jim Malico of OWASP and Chris Cornutt of PHPDeveloper.org. They also commented on the latest efforts to make PHP more secure, as well what PHP developers can do to develop more secure Web sites and applications, and minimising the damages of eventual security attacks.

PHP Town Hall Episode #15 - The Joomla Framework and the Ongoing History of PSR-4
The wonderfully handsome Don Gilbert joins us on our new YouTube Channel for our first live-recording of PHP Town Hall! He’s been working on the Joomla Framework to get it up to scratch with modern standards ready for a Joomla CMS rewrite, much in the same way that EllisLab pulled CodeIgniter out of ExpressionEngine… except for the standards bit, because they didn’t exist and PHP developers were too busy clubbing each other to death over tabs v spaces. We discuss how that whole situation is going, how they’ve been implementing various standards, how did they decide to build a framework instead of use an existing one, how the FIG is going and why Phil fucked up the PSR-4 Acceptance Vote three hours before the vote finished.

Laravel Application Development Blueprints (by Arda Kilicdaqi and Halil Ibrahim Yilmaz, published 14th November 2013)
Learn to develop 10 fantastic applications with the new and improved Laravel 4. Learn how to integrate third-party scripts and libraries into your application. With different techniques, learn how to adapt different methods to your needs. Expand your knowledge of Laravel 4 so you can tailor the sample solutions to your requirements.

The Joy of PHP: Deep Dive Into Sessions (by Alan Forbes, published 15th November 2013)
This is a short, focused book. It covers one (rich) topic related to PHP and that is the concept of Session Variables, also known as 'Sessions'. We explain how to create a database table of usernames and passwords, how to encrypt the passwords using the md5() function and how to create and process a login form. Once the user is logged in we can assign them session variables, such as Role, which will dictate which features of the web application will be visible and which will be hidden. Every line of code is explained in clear, easy-to-understand plain English.

How to Hire a Wordpress/PHP Developer For Your Project - Secrets You Must Know So Your Project Actually Gets Done (by Jean Paul, published 17th November 2013)
Can you relate to any of the following: A PHP/Wordpress developer you paid money disappeared like a ninja in the night? The night before you're ready to launch your product the developer says "I cant' do it!"? You have an unfinished project and don't know where to go next? You are about to do your first project and you're not sure how to go about it? If so, then this is the most important guide you'll ever read.

Jobs

If you have a position that needs filling, let us know and we will include it.

Developer at Sailthru (New York City)
We're searching for a talented developer who can take the challenge of scaling architectures and dive into leading technologies. You'll have the opportunity to work with a great team, in the heart of New York City and with great benefits such as working from home. Send your resume to Federico, [email protected].

DeskPRO is hiring Full Stack PHP Developer (Symfony/AngularJS) in London or Remote.
Join our small London based team (excellent remote workers considered as well) building a large PHP application where your work will have immediate impact on our millions of end users. Lots of interesting projects coming up including adding elasticsearch and memached to our stack, writing a DeskPRO app for telephony based upon Twilio, integrating our software with other companies APIs, adding functionality to our phonegap mobile app as well as continuing the development of our core software platform.

PHP (Drupal) developers at Torchbox (Bristol and Oxford, UK)
Passionate about PHP, delirious about Drupal and want to work on a wide variety of challenging yet fun projects for fantastic clients? If yes, then Torchbox would love to hear from you! In return, we can offer an enviable working environment (country park or buzzing Bristol), a competitive salary, all the usual kit and sometimes even a ski trip.

Full Stack Developer
Major television production company seeks an experienced web developer to join its digital division. The ideal candidate possesses a deep expertise and abiding love of web development, an incredible track record of producing stellar web applications (with a long list of URLs & GitHub repositories to prove it), a near-supernatural work ethic and a fantastic sense of humour.

Machine Learning / AI skills (project based)
Inovica are looking for someone to work with them on detecting ecommerce products on sites and extracting relevant information. In the first instance please email [email protected] stating the experience you have in this field. They don't have a job description online but will reply to every email they receive.

Message Digital Design Ltd is Hiring a Web Developer (PHP) 
We are looking for an experienced developer to work in our spacious offices in central Brighton, helping to deliver high-quality websites, e-commerce and online systems to a wide range of clients. At Message we give a damn about building the web the right way, and the successful applicant will too.

Ballers Bridge is Hiring a Sr. Yii Developer
We are looking for a motivated and outstanding candidate to lead our product development. The ideal candidate is an experienced problem solver, quick thinker/learner, self-motivated and not afraid of challenges.

PHP Engineers for Bright.Com in San Francisco
We are looking for PHP engineers to join our growing team! The ideal candidate is language agnostic, and can work with both scripting languages (such as Python and PHP) as well as strongly typed languages (such as C++ and Java), and has a passion for taking an idea and exploring, tinkering, debating, and demonstrating the fastest, most efficient, flexible and scalable implementation approaches. Experience working with traditional SQL databases as well as newer technologies, indexes and data stores is key (such as Solr, ElasticSearch, Redis, or Neo4j), and you must be comfortable using Linux and other open source technologies.

Senior PHP Developer in Bucharest, Romania
We are searching for a passionate PHP developer who will be part of a team of senior programmers and experienced testing engineers, directly involved in technical development projects, using Agile Scrum as methodology.

Performance Telecom (UK) seek freelancer (Remote worker) - Python and PHP Developer
This position is primarily Python, but PHP skills are also required.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
 

hubReports
hubReports is a site that collects daily statistics from github on a range of languages. The top languages (one of which is PHP) also have their top repositories and users monitored so you can easily see how they're progressing and what might be trending.

wave
The core Wave framework. Wave is a lightweight MVC framework written in PHP

ask
Library containing a PHP implementation of the Ask query language. The implementation consists of out of domain objects that represent various parts of Ask queries.

laravel4-PHPExcel
Laravel 4 wrapper for PHPOffice's PHPExcel library

simple_php_skeleton
A simple skeleton PHP project, using composer and other tools, like PHPUnit, to create a enviroment to use TDD.

MControl
MControl is an easy-to-use minecraft server control library, via the rcon protocol.

danielstjules/pho
BDD test framework for PHP, inspired by Jasmine and RSpec. Work in progress. Feature requests and pull requests welcome!

es_service
Simplified ElasticSearch manager/service class to get your PHP/Symfony Based server app using Elastic Search with minimum complications, but easily extendable to take on the bespoke. Contains a normal PHP Manager class which can be used in your application.

php-semver
The semantic versioner for npm ported from node-semver 1.1.2 to PHP.

phing-packagist
Phing extension to load task direct from packagist.org libs.

FormValidator
Yet another php form validator.

miner
A dead simple PHP class for building SQL statements. No manual string concatenation necessary.

veridu-php
The PHP Software Development Kit for Veridu API. This library can be found on Packagist. The recommended way to install this is through composer.

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