Hello to the PHP community, and welcome to PHPweekly.com.
This week the php.net team has announced the release of PHP 7.3.0RC5 which is available now for testing.
Also released this week is Laravel 5.7.15, containing a new validation rule and Eloquent relationship getters, plus release candidates for WordPress 5.0 and Symfony 4.2.0.
With the holiday season just around the corner, the PHP security advent calendar analyses 24 exciting security bugs that were detected in the most widespread WordPress plugins.
Plus the Dutch PHP Conference has been announced for June next year, taking place in Amsterdam. The Call for Papers is now open.
And finally, this week we would like introduce you to another newsletter. TLDR brings byte sized links and tldrs to busy techies, of the most interesting stories in tech, on a daily basis.
Enjoy!
Cheers
Ade and Katie |
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Articles
PHP Security Advent Calendar 2018 Announcement
The holiday season is coming up again and it’s time for some security fun. For the third time in a row, we are proud to announce our PHP security advent calendar. This year, we will analyse 24 exciting security bugs that we detected in the most widespread WordPress plugins.
Is PHP Dead? No! At Least Not According to PHP Usage Statistics
You’ve probably heard about how the new WordPress Gutenberg editor brings block-based editing to WordPress. And while blocks have been much of the focus, there’s also another change going on behind the scenes that casual users might not notice – the Gutenberg editor is built on React, not PHP. That change, along with other shifts in web development, might have you wondering, “is PHP dead?”.
Symfony Leaves PHP-FIG, the Framework Interoperability Group
Yesterday, Symfony, a community of 600,000 developers from more than 120 countries, announced that it will no longer be a member of the PHP-FIG, a framework interoperability group. Prior to Symfony, the other major members to leave this group include, Laravel, Propel, Guzzle, and Doctrine.
How PHP Conferences Can Be Improved
The past few years I visited and spoke at a lot of PHP conferences. PHP Benelux, Laracon EU and US, PHP UK Conference, PHP World are only a few of the conferences I thoroughly enjoyed. Visiting those conferences can be recommended to anyone interested in PHP. Regardless of which level you're at you'll learn some things and you'll meet interesting people. In this blog post, I'd to highlight what PHP conferences, in general, could consider copying from a conference like DotJS. |
Tutorials and Talks
Integrate PHP Opcache & Make Your Application Win Big With Performance
Best practices for optimising PHP performance is a way broad topic and I can cover a lot of things in it. Previously I’ve written few guides regarding PHP best practices and firebase integrations which can be beneficial to kickstart with performance issues and database delivery. In this article, I’ll give you a brief description about what is OPcache, the benefits of it and steps of integration. More importantly you will see how Cloudways has simplified the PHP OPcache integration in its PHP Hosting server.
Building a Laravel Translation Package – Building The Frontend
In the previous article of this series, I talked you through my process of putting everything needed in place to start building out the frontend. This article will build on that groundwork to complete the user interface of the package.
Hosting WordPress Yourself Part 5 – Cron, Email and Automatic Backups
In the previous installment of this series, I walked you through the process of setting up server monitoring and caching. In this post I will demonstrate how to configure cron, outgoing email and automatic backups.
Fatal Error: Uncaught Error: [] Operator Not Supported for Strings in
That's right! PHP 5.6 and 7.0 are entering EOL - end of line life this December. Social networks, Slacks, Twitter, Reddit are full of it. Are you running PHP 7.1? Good, come next year when PHP 7.1 is eoling. For the rest of you, what will you do when PHP will tell you the message in the title?
Write to Files and Read Files With PHP
In this tutorial, you'll learn several important functions in PHP which are sufficient for all your basic file reading and writing needs. You'll learn how to read a file, write to a file, write to a text file, and check if a file exists.
Ways of Creation Custom Composer Dependency
Сomposer is awesome. It allows us to manage dependencies and required libraries for the application we are developing. But what if the dependency we need does not exist in the composer default repository. Then we as inventors (maybe not) implement it ourselves. In this post I will discuss the basic techniques of how this can be done.
The Ultimate BotMan Chatbot Debugging Guide
Starting with BotMan to create chatbots is easy, but dealing with bugs is not. Since there are many external services like Facebook, Telegram or Slack involved, lots of things can and will go wrong. I have run into so many of these bugs and don't want you to struggle with them as I did. So here is my ultimate debugging guide.
Best Visual Studio Code PHP Extensions for 2018
Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is completely competent with the PHP language. It’s something that shocked me personally when it was released as I really didn’t expect it to come prepared for PHP developers. But yep, it is a valid development environment for PHP, and of course, there are plenty of extensions to be used with it. In this article, I will go through the best available extensions that can be installed with your version of VSCode. With this list of essential extensions you can configure your Visual Studio Code IDE into a wizardry-code-environment.
Delay Constructor Execution By Using ServiceManager Lazy Services
A couple years ago I wrote a post about how to improve PHP applications performance by using zend-servicemanager lazy services. In that article I explained how the ServiceManager takes advantage of the proxy design pattern to delay the creation of services, when they are marked as lazy. That can improve performance if the object is resource consuming, but that is not the only advantage behind proxies.
401 Unauthorised
When a client makes a HTTP request, but the server requires the request to be authenticated a 401 Unauthorised status is returned.
Coloured App Environment in Docker Shell
When running a shell in a docker container, you only see random hashes as hostname. Now imagine having a dozen of terminals open, and then you run ./vendor/bin/phpunit in container 71f68dcd5379. The first thing that the PHPUnit bootstrap script does is emptying the database and then running all migrations and seeds.
Target CSS for Specific Content With WordPress Template Tags
Learning WordPress development isn't just about learning to code PHP. You'll also need some HTML and CSS skills if the sites, themes and/or plugins you create are going to work well. In this tutorial, I'll show you an incredibly useful feature of WordPress that mixes PHP with some simple CSS. It's an easy-to-use but powerful technique which will give you more control over the way your content is displayed. |
News and Announcements
PHP 7.3.0RC6 Released
The PHP team is glad to announce the presumably last PHP 7.3.0 pre-release, PHP 7.3.0RC6. The rough outline of the PHP 7.3 release cycle is specified in the PHP Wiki. Please carefully test this version and report any issues found in the bug reporting system.
THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT PREVIEW - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION!
Laravel 5.7.15 Released
Laravel 5.7.15 is available with a new validation rule and Eloquent relationship getters.
WordPress 5.0 Release Candidate
The first release candidate for WordPress 5.0 is now available! This is an important milestone, as we near the release of WordPress 5.0. The WordPress 5.0 release date has shifted from the 27th to give more time for the RC to be fully tested. A final release date will be announced soon, based on feedback on the RC. This is a big release and needs your help - if you haven’t tried 5.0 yet, now is the time!
Symfony 4.2.0-RC1 Released
Symfony 4.2.0-RC1 has just been released with a list of the most important bug changes.
DrupalSouth - 3rd-5th December 2018, Canberra
DrupalSouth is one of the longest running Drupal events in the Asia-Pacific region, and the key event for Drupal users in Australia and New Zealand. DrupalSouth Canberra 2018 represents the event’s 10th anniversary. This year promises to be one of the biggest yet, with up to 500 people expected at the Hotel Realm in Canberra for two days of fantastic presentations, discussions, networking and learning. The DrupalGov conference, run annually in Canberra since 2013 with about 250 attendees, will be combined with DrupalSouth this year. The last Late Tickets are on sale now.
PHP Benelux - 26-27th January 2019, Antwerp
The 10th edition of the conference has been announced for January next year and this time all activities will be retro-themed. We will be looking back on all the good vibes of the old days to see what has changed over the years. Early Bird Tickets are on sale now.
Sunshine PHP Conference - 7-9th February 2019, Miami
The Sunshine PHP Developer Conference is hosted by the South Florida PHP community (SoFloPHP) in Miami, Florida from February 7th - 9th 2019 and you're invited! We'll host some of the best speakers, awesome talk topics, latest technologies and up to date news in PHP. And don't forget our Hack-a-thon and Uncon'ference, as well as a great hallway track! Early Bird Tickets are on sale now.
Dutch PHP Conference - June 6-8th 2019, Amsterdam
The Dutch PHP Conference is very pleased to announce the dates for the 2019 edition: we will be organising DPC19 on 6, 7 and 8 of June 2019! We will be hosting the conference again in the RAI Amsterdam venue. Traditionally we start with a preconference tutorial day on Thursday June 6, followed by 2 full conference days packed with keynotes, sessions, community events, parties and more! The Call for Papers is now open. |
Podcasts
Full Stack Radio Podcast Episode 102: Paul Jarvis - Staying Small
In this episode Adam talks to Paul Jarvis about defining your own version of success and why you might not need to build a big business to achieve it.
Laravel News Podcast LN74: Space, Danger and 80's-themed Development Conferences
Jake and Michael discuss all the latest Laravel releases, tutorials, and happenings in the community including Laravel database hashing package.
LaraChat Live - Episode #37
More of the same old?
The Laracasts Snippets Episode 87: Discipline Versus Laziness
I've focused a great deal on discipline this year. I'm not sure why, but it might be related to the fact that I now have two increasingly time-consuming children that I'm responsible for. While, in the past, I'd often find myself edging toward the "I'll do it tomorrow" path, this year, I've worked hard to sprint in the opposite direction. Or, in other words, even when you're desperate to avoid it, deal with your shit.
PHP Ugly Podcast #129: John "Big Spoon" Congdon
This week Eric, John and Thomas discuss various topics including how PHP conferences can be improved.
PHP Web Development Podcast Ep #24: Cyber Security
This is our 2nd last week with Mark. We will be talking about cyber security, we will touch on why this is such a big topic right now. Mark Harding will be explaining the meaning of Encryption, tune in to hear me make a fool out of myself by saying “ensciption” instead of “Encryption” . Mark will touch a bit more on Minds.com. |
TLDR Newsletter
TLDR is a daily newsletter with links and TLDRs of the most interesting stories in tech! Byte sized news for busy techies.
The Laracon Australia 2018 Videos Have Been Released
This year Laracon AU was held for the very first time. The organisation was so kind to record all talks which are now available on YouTube. Below you can see the talk titled "Abusing Laravel for Fun and Profit" by David Hemphill.
A Week of Symfony #621 (19-25 November 2018)
This week Symfony focused on fixing the last issues found in the upcoming Symfony 4.2 version, which will be released in two weeks. We also improved the way to handle .env files in Symfony apps. Lastly, we announced discounts to save up to 30% in some Symfony services and a new SymfonyLive conference in Lille (France) in 2019.
Want to Master the WordPress Loop? Try Our New Course
The Loop is at the core of WordPress's post rendering engine. If you want to customise the way posts are displayed in your WordPress theme, you'll need to come to terms with The Loop.
An Introduction to WordPress Penetration Testing
Recently I had Tim Nash, the WordPress platform lead at 34SP.com, speak at the local WordPress meetup I help run. It’s the third time Tim has spoken at the meetup, and in the past he has spoken about site security and performance but this time he spoke about a handful of case studies of hackings; how the sites were exploited and what could be done to mitigate the vulnerability. |
Jobs
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Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
statsd-php
A PHP client library for the statistics daemon (statsd) intended to send metrics from PHP applications.
freescout
FreeScout is the super lightweight free open source help desk and shared inbox written in PHP7 (Laravel 5.5 framework) – self hosted clone of HelpScout.
credit-card
This rule will validate that a given credit card number, expiration date or cvc is valid.
php-watermark
Add text or image Watermark on image and PDF using PHP and ImageMagick.
koolreport
This is an Open Source PHP Reporting Framework which you can use to write perfect data reports or to construct awesome dashboards using PHP.
laravel-visits
Laravel Visits is a counter that can be attached to any model to track its visits based on Redis.
phpipam
phpIPAM is an open-source web IP address management application. Its goal is to provide light and simple IP address management application.
git-wrapper
Git Wrapper provides a readable API that abstracts challenges of executing Git commands from within a PHP process for you.
web-push-php
WebPush can be used to send notifications to endpoints which server delivers Web Push notifications as described in the Web Push protocol. As it is standardised, you don't have to worry about what server type it relies on.
textpattern
A flexible, elegant, fast and easy-to-use content management system written in PHP.
phplist3
Fully functional Open Source email marketing manager for creating, sending, integrating, and analysing email campaigns and newsletters.
browscap
This tool is used to build and maintain browscap files. |
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