Welcome back PHP fans :)
This week the PHP development team has announced its latest releases - PHP 5.6.9, 5.4.41 and 5.5.25, all available immediately.
Also the Zend performance team has produced a diagram providing insight into the upcoming impact of PHP7.
We have the 2nd part of the series on Conditional Tags in WordPress, this week reviewing 13 conditional tags.
Plus the php[world] Conference has been announced for November, with the Call for Papers already open.
And finally, in this weeks Full Stack Radio podcast Adam Culp, of Sunshine PHP, talks about attending and speaking at conferences, and making the most of both.
Have a great weekend,
Cheers
Katie and Ade |
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Articles
PHP: The Myths, The Maths & The Musts
There’s a popular saying about programming languages - “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody use.” Possibly the most targeted language in this regard is PHP. The reality is that PHP may have a few drawbacks, but it is still the first language of choice for web development.
Turbocharging The Web With PHP7
The Zend performance team provides insight into the upcoming impact of PHP7.
Splitting the ZF2 Components
Today we accomplished one of the major goals towards Zend Framework 3: splitting the various components into their own repositories. This proved to be a huge challenge, due to the amount of history in our repository (the git repository has history going back to 2009, around the time ZF 1.8 was released!), and the goals we had for what component repositories should look like. This is the story of how we made it happen.
10 Essential Tips for CakePHP Development
Developers can face all sorts of surprises. This article talks about ten of the most common, with tips on how to deal with them. |
Tutorials and Talks
PHP 5.5 on Oracle VirtualBox
PHP 5.5 has added a nice support for Generators, which I’ll cover in some other post. I needed to test these new features and add some to old applications. However, PHP has dropped support for Windows XP and Windows 2003 starting with PHP 5.5 and I still have a Windows XP machine (along with Ubuntu 14.0 LTS). Although I could install PHP 5.5 in Ubuntu, most of the time I’m using Windows. I decided to go with VirtualBox for installing PHP 5.5, as I have some legacy PHP applications that I want to upgrade to the new version, and VirtualBox makes it easier to switch between operating systems.
Migrating Legacy Applications to AngularJS
John Barlow writes - I'll admit it, I was a little afraid of AngularJS at first. I had seen other frameworks that were similar and immediately discounted this as "just another JavaScript framework" - until I used it. In those short moments I discovered that AngularJS is magical, and that I must use it for all new projects! New projects? Right… like any of us have the time for new things, when we have these heaps of old applications we are in charge of maintaining. However, if we could use AngularJS for new work, and migrate the old, Yes! This sounded like a plan.
Web Accessibility Tips for Developers
It’s up to both the developer and the client to achieve site accessibility. Although they usually work together in the planning and later stages of website creation, a developer and client also have separate responsibilities in making a site accessible. This blog post, the first in a four-part series that offers website accessibility tips for developers, will make this important part of development easy to follow.
Using Ajax Forms in Drupal 8
In this article, I am going to show you a clean way of using the Drupal 8 Ajax API without writing one line of JavaScript code. To this end, we will go back to the first custom form we built for Drupal 8 in a previous article and Ajaxify some of its behaviour to make it more user friendly.
Tries and Lexers
A Trie is a specific data structure that is used to represent a group of strings as a tree. A lexer is a tool that performs Lexical Analysis on an input string. If you have heard the term "tokenization", it's the same process. Read about Anthony Ferrara's experience with both whilst working on some experimental projects.
PHP Dumper using Websockets
There are several PHP dumpers, including Raul Fraile’s LadyBug. There are also libraries that do something similar, such as Chrome Logger. This article discusses using Websockets and dump values in real time, without waiting to the end of backend script.
A Walkthrough on Conditional Tags in WordPress: 1 to 13
In the first part of this series, we went through the fundamentals of Conditional Tags - what they are, how to use them, and some scenarios where Conditional Tags come in handy. In this second part, we're going to start reviewing 13 Conditional Tags, and in five articles (including this one), we'll finish going through all 65 Conditional Tags that are documented in the Codex.
Memoization or Function Cache
A little known feature of PHP’s static keyword is that it allows for memoization or function caching. This is a process whereby a function's heavy lifting can be cached so that subsequent calls are faster.
Defeating Expression Language
How beautiful Expression Language definitions are, right? I mean, inserting that complex expression in a Dependency Injection configuration file is so nice and fast if you need to inject the result of a method in a service (one of the multiple examples we can see).
Displaying Youtube Videos in PHP
In this two-part article, we’re going to learn how to work with version 3 of the Youtube API and we’ll build a demo along the way. |
News and Announcements
PHP 5.6.9 is Available
The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.6.9. Several bugs have been fixed. All PHP 5.6 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.
PHP 5.4.41 Released
The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.41. Seven security-related issues were fixed in this version. All PHP 5.4 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.
PHP 5.5.25 is Available
The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.5.25. Several bugs have been fixed. All PHP 5.5 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.
PSR-7 Released Today
This week PSR-7 got the 'accepted' state after quite a long journey. This is the result of the hard work of many people, but in particular Matthew Weier O'Phinney who did an amazing job herding cats with class.
Nomad PHP US - May 21st 2015 20:00 CDT
An In-depth Look at Slim Framework 3.0, presented by Josh Lockhart. Join Josh Lockhart as he discusses the Slim Framework, a PHP micro framework that helps you quickly write simple yet powerful web applications and APIs. You’ll learn about the framework’s history, and you’ll get an in-depth look at the architecture and improvements in version 3.0. Josh will demonstrate how to build and organise a Slim Framework application. He’ll also demonstrate how to integrate popular third-party components.
Nomad PHP EU - May 21st 2015 20:00 CEST
How to Serialise a Closure and Get a Million Downloads, by Jeremy Lindblom. Did you know that you cannot serialise a Closure object! Well, that is what the PHP runtime tells you when you try to do it, anyway. Back in 2010, I set out to prove PHP wrong with my SuperClosure project, which allows you to serialise - and then actually unserialise and execute - PHP closures. I’ve learned a lot along the way, especially about Closures, Reflection and lexical parsing. I want to tell you the whole story, teach you some of PHP’s dark magic, and show you how some code snippets in a blog post evolved into a quirky open source project that has been downloaded over two million times, despite its usage of the infamous eval().
php[world] - November 16-20th 2015, Washington DC
Once again, we will be inviting all the varied sub-communities of PHP to join us under one roof; WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, Magento, Zend Framework, Symfony, CakePHP, Laravel and more! We will be planning specific tracks for each framework, as well as finding great crossover talks that will appeal to everyone. The Call for Papers is open now, and Early Bird tickets are currently available.
Bulgaria PHP Conference - 25-27th September 2015, Sofia
This event is the initiative of a small group of developers who started the first PHP User Group in Sofia, Bulgaria just two years ago. Our desire to learn and our love for the code gave us the courage to take the initiative and bring some of the best minds in the PHP community to our home town. We have invited some top-notch speakers from all over the world who will make sure you will enjoy some high-quality talks. But most of all, we hope to get together some great people who will spend their weekend sharing their know-how and getting to know the large PHP community. Early bird tickets are available now.
App Sec USA - September 22-25th 2015, San Francisco
AppSec USA 2015 is a 96-hour conference in beautiful San Francisco that will include the best talks and training on application and information security. It is a world-class security conference for developers, auditors, risk managers, technologists and entrepreneurs - a gathering of the world’s top security practitioners to share their latest research and practices. Tickets are available now. |
Podcasts
Laravel IO Podcast: Episode 27 - Jeffrey Way: Tau Ceti Murderer
This week the crew discusses new Laravel 5.1 goodies, unit testing, Lifeline for iOS, and which album they would take to a desert island.
Three Devs and a Maybe Podcast: Space Beer Cave
In this weeks two developer podcast, we start off the discussion with Edd's recent holiday to America - including experiences driving, Carousel and Instagram. We then move on to chat about 'Space Beer Cave', Fraser's recently released game for the Android platform. Built using Phaser and CocoonJS we touch upon how the game was initially built in a single day, along with the process of getting it uploaded to the Google Play store. Finally, we talk about how Fraser is able to balance freelance and full-time employment, along with handy material that Troy Hunt has released in regard to web security. With the release of Space Beer Cave, the podcast's first competition has been devised. Simply download the game from the Google Play store (sorry iOS users at this time), play and then tweet/email a screen-grab of your highest score. The competition ends on the 12th June 2015 18:00:00 GMT with the winner receiving their very own Three Devs and a Maybe t-shirt!
The Changelog Podcast #155: The Future of Node.js with Scott Hammond
In this episode we catch up with Scott to talk about the history of Node, Joyent’s interest, how they’ve handled the stewardship of Node over the years, their support of io.js joining Node Foundation and the convergence of the code bases for a stronger, and more inclusive, Node community.
Voices of the ElePHPant - Interview with Gary Hockin
This week Cal Evans talks to Gary Hockin, PHP developer, Zend contributor and Roave team member.
Full Stack Radio Episode 17: Adam Culp - Maximising Your Conference Experience
In this episode, Adam talks to Adam Culp, organiser of Sunshine PHP and ZendCon. They talk about how to get into conference speaking, how to make the most of a conference as an attendee, as well as tips for running a great local user group.
MageTalk Magento Podcast #38 - Tom “Voracious Appetite for Digital” Robertshaw
A recap of Magento Imagine recorded backstage during Imagine with @bobbyshaw.
Run Geek Radio Podcast: Episode #3 - OpenWest Namebadges, Overtraining, Developer Salary and Freelance Rates, and Saving Money
Adam Culp talks about the awesome namebadges at the OpenWest conference, and how assembly was required using a soldering iron. Then he shares symptoms, causes, and treatment for over-training while running (mentions Tension Tamer tea, but intended to speak about Sleepy Time tea instead). Following this the subject of developers and money was covered. What should developers charge per hour, what should a freelance developer pay themselves, and what should developers do to save money for a rainy day.
Lately in PHP Podcast Episode 59 - Are You Ready for MySQL Extension Removal from PHP?
When PHP7 is released it will have the mysql extension removed from the core distribution. PHP 5.4 will stop being updated. Many PHP developers will have to move to PHP version 5.5 or higher, on which the mysql extension is deprecated. Many shared hosting providers already use PHP 5.5 without the mysql extension. Alternative solutions to deal with legacy code that relies on the old mysql extension was one of the topics commented on by Manuel Lemos and Arturs Sosins in episode 59 of the Lately in PHP podcast.
PHP Town Hall #41:Loosely Town Hall - Dallas Edition
This episode is brought to you from thunderstruck Dallas, as part of the awesome conference that is Lone Star PHP. We are joined once again by the dynamic duo Jeff Carouth and Matt Frost from the Loosely Coupled podcast! We mostly make a bunch of bad jokes, then drag up the audience to talk about stuff. Let's be honest, this was a bit of a crapshoot, but Elizabeth Smith goes into some detail on PECL and the problems of ownership. PSR-7 is chatted about for the 19th time and Jordi talks a bit about pickles. Also, we debate “haytch” vs. “atch” as the correct pronunciation of the “H” in HTTP. Important stuff. |
Interview with Taylor Otwell
On the Product and Support blog this week is an interview with Taylor Otwell, creator of Laravel, founder of Laravel Forge and founder of Envoyer.
Learning Yii Testing (by Matteo Pescarin, published 28th Apr 2015)
Developers who have a solid pre-existing knowledge of Yii's core concepts will find this book an ideal introduction to learning to write tests using Yii 2's tools. You'll learn to create faster and more reliable applications with less time and effort.
Laravel Five Essentials (by Martin Bean, published 28th April 2015)
Create a dynamic web application that can read and write data to a database, improve your PHP skills and develop a new outlook on solving programming issues. |
Jobs
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Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
elgg
A social networking engine in PHP/MySQL.
array-filter
An improved version of PHP's standard array_filter.
impresspages
ImpressPages is a light PHP framework with a user friendly admin panel.
whoops
Whoops is an error handler base/framework for PHP.
core
The XP framework is an all-purpose, object oriented PHP framework.
virgil-php
Virgil Security Crypto Stack PHP library.
serendipity
Serendipity is a PHP-powered weblog application which gives the user an easy way to maintain an online diary, weblog or even a complete homepage.
spectrum
A syntax highlighter based on prism.js for PHP.
elefant
Elefant is a refreshingly simple PHP content management system and web framework.
garden-cli
Garden CLI is a PHP command line interface library meant to provide a full set of functionality, with a clean and simple api.
fakerino
PHP Fake data generator framework with multiple input and output formats.
watchtower
WatchTower is a library that allows for the identification and authentication of users, using different backend providers and protocols.
sylius
Sylius is an open source e-commerce solution for PHP, based on the Symfony2 framework.
pharext
Distribute your PHP extension as self-installing phar executable.
trumpet
The presentation tool for PHP developers.
marshaller
A PHP library that converts from one format to another. |
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