Hello to all our fans in the PHP community.
After a lot of debate and voting, a decision has finally been made on the name of the next major PHP version. Read about the proposals, and what to expect for the future of PHP 7.
Nomad PHP is hosting a special event next week. Adam Harvey presents "Because Incrementing Major Versions is for Suckers" on the 13th at 19:00 BST.
The CakePHP Conference still has tickets available for the 4-day workshop and conference CakeFest, for both new and old users of the framework. This year it takes place in Madrid, starting on August 21st.
Also podcasts this week come courtesy of Three Devs and a Maybe, PHP Town Hall and Voices of the ElePHPant.
And finally, if you are looking to become a Zend Certified PHP Engineer, the PHP Study Guide covers everything you need to know, including several mock questions to test yourself with.
Have a great weekend people ;0)
Cheers
Katie |
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Articles
PHP 7 Features and Release Date
So it is settled then. After a lot of discussion, the voting process to choose the name for the next major PHP version ended this week. The winning proposal is for the next major version, after PHP 5.x, to be called PHP 7. Read this article to understand the proposals and what to expect for the future of PHP 7 in terms of features and possible release date.
PHP News You May Have Missed - July 2014
Closer inspection of a handful of PHP news items from last month.
Understanding OpCache
PHP in version 5.5 comes with a caching engine built-in – OpCache – which stores precompiled script bytecode in the memory. If you’re familiar with APC or Xcache, you will already know how such engines work. This article answers some of the typical questions regarding different practical aspects of working with this particular cache engine. |
Tutorials and Talks
How To Make Microsoft Word Documents with PHP
We live in a world where PHP devs have to deal with the Windows operating system from time to time. WMI (Windows Management Interface) is one such occasion and Microsoft Office Interop is another – an even more important and more frequently used one. In this article, we will see a simple integration between Word and PHP: to generate a Microsoft Word document based on the inputs in an HTML form using PHP (and its Interop extension).
Understanding and Working with Data in WordPress
Most WordPress users never come into direct contact with the database and may not even be aware that it's constantly working to populate their site. When WordPress serves up any kind of page, be that the home page, a single post or page or an archive, it's accessing the database to bring up content that editors and administrators have added to the site. This is the first in a series of tutorials looking in detail at different aspects of the WordPress database.
PHP, PDO & HP Vertica
This article shares the process Chris Cornutt followed to get HP's Vertica working on a Vagrant-provisioned linux box (VirtualBox).
Accessing ServiceManager Services in Controller Plugins
This tutorial shows you how to access a service from the ServiceManager in a custom Controller Plugin you’re creating.
PECL/mysqlnd_ms: How Failed XA Transactions Get Fixed
XA transactions are an open standard for distributed transactions. A distributed or global transaction can spawn multiple databases. XA transactions come in handy, for example, when data sets are sharded over multiple servers and a business transaction affects multiple shards.
Best Practices When Working With Sensitive Data: Securing Your Application
The previous article showed you how to protect your server from attacks and malicious software. This part will focus completely on the third layer of security - your application itself, showing you techniques that you can use to protect your application from attacks and intrusions.
Creating Real Time Applications with PHP and WebSockets
This article will explore the main PHP libraries used to create real time, bi-directional applications between clients and servers over WebSockets.
How To Install The Latest PHP-NG Version From Source
Despite it not being “stable” or “generally available”, PHP-NG is quite usable. Obviously you’ll have to test your site thoroughly and monitor it for any discrepancies, but this weekend Mark Gavalda at Kinsta tested a fresh build of the PHP-NG branch with many WordPress sites and, other than a few minor incompatibilities with one of the themes, it worked great. |
News and Announcements
PHP 5.6.0RC3 is available
The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of the third release candidate of PHP 5.6. As we entered the feature freeze with beta1, this is a bugfix-only release. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs in the bug tracking system.
Nomad PHP Special Event – 13:00 CDT/19:00 BST August 13, 2014
PHP 5.6 and Beyond: Because Incrementing Major Versions is for Suckers, presented by Adam Harvey. In this talk, Adam describes what PHP 5.6 provides, looks back at how distributions and server hosts have handled the faster pace of PHP releases, and talks about where PHP is going in terms of a new, backward compatibility breaking major release and how that might be handled, with particular reference to other languages that have attempted the same trick with varying degrees of success (from Perl to Python to Ruby).
New Zealand PHP Conference - August 27-29th 2014, Wellington
Two days of conferences with awesome sessions, along with one additional day of PHP training and lots of opportunities to meet and greet developers from all over New Zealand. Featuring renowned speakers, including none other than Rasmus Lerdorf, presenting two concurrent tracks including over 22 talks exploring PHP trends and other topics to both inspire and challenge you.
Northeast PHP Conference - September 6-7th 2014, Boston
The Northeast PHP Conference is a web developer conference focused on PHP, Web Technology and UX. There has been a lot of demand for such a conference in this region, and we are excited to be hosting it again. We are bringing in over 300 attendees from across the northeast and beyond. Tickets are on sale now.
Madison PHP Conference - September 13th 2014, Wisconsin
Register now for this one day, three-track conference that focuses on PHP and related web technologies. This event is organised by Madison PHP and is designed to offer something to attendees at all skill levels. It will be a day of networking, learning, sharing and great fun! Pre-registration tickets are available now.
CakeFest: The CakePHP Conference - August 21st-24th 2014, Madrid
For the past 9 years, CakePHP has been a benchmark for PHP development, providing developers with a full MVC stack solution to build powerful applications which scale. Two Workshop days, which is an ideal way to learn as a beginner with CakePHP, and two Conference days, for both new and old users of the framework. A few tickets are still available. |
PHP Town Hall #29: Dont Mention PHP 6 v PHP 7
This week Ben and Phil are joined by Paul M. Jones and Daniel Lowrey, to talk about a whole bunch of PHP related things. Paul has recently been talking a lot about “Action Domain Responder” which is billed as a more representative replacement of the often mis-used “Model View Controller” architecture. Daniel then goes on to talk about a few awesome topics, including some of the OpenSSL changes in 5.6, and a HTTP server he is working on built entirely from PHP. We cover HTTP 2 and its effect on PHP, give some thoughts on PSR-7 HTTP Message, talk about Aura, and finally, when Phil could hold it no more, we had a big rant about PHP 6 v PHP 7 which - at the time - was still being voted on. The end result is of course that PHP 7 won.
Three Devs and a Maybe Podcast: The First Q&A Show with Justin DeLucia
This week we have good friend of the show Justin DeLucia on to help host our first dedicated Q&A episode. Not only that, but Fraser is back! Along with some crazy adventures that he discusses since his last time on the show. We have been fortunate to receive many questions throughout the past couple of weeks, and thought it would be good to release the answers as a dedicated show. Topics discussed include breaking into the industry, the PDO vs. Mysqli debate, bespoke vs. off-the-shelf CMS debate and what to consider when building a Web API.
Voices of the ElePHPant - Interview with Joel Clermont
This week Cal Evans talks to Joel Clermont, Lead Developer at GrowthPoint, Inc in Milwaukee.
HHVM: The Alternative PHP Runtime
The PHP language is almost 20 years old, as is its reference implementation that can be downloaded from PHP.net. In the last decade, alternative runtimes for PHP came and went. The HipHop VM (HHVM) that is developed – and used in production – by Facebook, however, is probably not only here to stay but very likely going to influence the future of PHP considerably. This presentation is by Sebastian Bergmann at this year's International PHP Conference.
PHP Certification Study Guide
The PHP Study Guide provides an excellent resource to pre-test your skills and guide you to your ultimate goal of becoming a Zend Certified PHP Engineer. It helps you confirm if you are fully prepared for your PHP Exam, or to identify areas that you may need more study time prior to taking in identified topics. Edited and produced by members of the PHP Advisory Board (the experts who helped to develop the exam), this guide covers how the exam will be delivered, what major topics & subtopics you need to know, and includes several mock questions to practice with.
A Practical Handbook for WordPress Themes (by Tristan Denyer, published 9th July 2014)
This book is written primarily to help owners and operators of self-hosted WordPress websites to avoid common errors when selecting, purchasing and working with WordPress themes. |
Jobs
DeskPRO is hiring a QA Engineer with Codeception Experience. (London or Remote / Perm or Contract)
Join our team and lead the QA effort at DeskPRO. Your initial focus will be building a large acceptance test framework in codeception.
SHAREIGHT Full Stack Developer - London
SHAREIGHT are looking to add talented full-stack developers to their team. To gain a place in our team you should have solid experience building and maintaining complex software systems. Developers who apply creativity and passion to solve human problems with software and technology will fit right in with us. We work in an Agile way and value team players who can collaborate with others to deliver elegant solutions.
*CMNTY is Looking for a Symfony2 PHP Developer!
CMNTY Corporation develops online communities. Our SaaS solutions will belong to your main task areas. You will be responsible for the architecture, planning and development of our products. You will implement new features, find and fix bugs and optimize code. Visit our Facebook page to learn more.
Developer for Performance Telecom
Performance Telecom require a developer, based near Durham, UK, to work on an exciting Customer Satisfaction system. This role would suit someone with experience as well as someone who is willing to learn new 'stuff'. Contact [email protected] with your CV/Resume and for more information. This is NOT a remote position.
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 memcached 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. |
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
php-roku
PHP Library for communication with Roku External Control Protocol.
bones-flash
Flash notification module for Laravel.
ssa/core
Framework to simply do ajax calls with php service.
gliph
A graph library for PHP.
poller
A PHP library for basic polling stuff.
php-phantomjs
Execute PhantomJS commands through PHP.
wellrested
Simple PHP Library for RESTful APIs.
segment-io-php
A PHP library for reporting events to the Segment.io API.
imapd
IMAP server written in PHP.
bootstrap
Helper library to create Bootstrap html fields.
knpmenu
Menu Library for PHP5.
bamboo-fixtures
Fixtures for Bamboo project.
codesniffer
Our custom PHP CodeSniffer rules and reporter.
after
Simple PHP concurrency primitives.
former
A powerful form builder for Laravel and other frameworks (stand-alone too).
socializr
Simple PHP library for posting to several social networks. |
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