PHP News Brief (Q2 2021)

Honeybadger's quarterly briefings keep you up to date on the most important developments in your programming communities. We curate the news so you can spend more time focusing on what's really important.

• Events: Conferences and meetups. Upcoming and recently completed.
• Security: Recent vulnerability reports
• Projects: News about major community projects
• Trending Topics: Summaries of the big topics everyone's talking about
• Standout Content: Content that didn't fit in other sections, but that was too cool to leave out.

Events

phpday 2021 on Jun 8-9

phpday is the yearly gathering for the European PHP community, since 2003. The event is international and all sessions will be in English. 2021 edition is taking place online.

• May 31: Free ticket for phpday 2021
• Apr 12: The Italian PHP user group GrUSP is pleased to announce the 18th edition of phpday 2021, in its digital edition, taking place on June 8-9th, 2021.

SymfonyWorld Online 2021 Summer Edition on Jun 17-18

The online conference will have keynotes on Symfony Forms, serverless cloud, Symfony Turbo, IT sustainability, and more.

• Jun 17: SymfonyWorld Online 2021 Summer Edition starts today!
• Jul 5: A quick walkthrough over the talks, dates, and more.

Web Summer Camp on Sep 2-3

Web Summer Camp is a conference based in Croation, with hands-on workshops for web developers, designers and decision-makers with hands-on workshops on topics related to JavaScript, PHP and Symfony.

• Apr 9: Get ready for Web Summer Camp in Šibenik, Croatia!

IPC Munich - International PHP Conference on Oct 25-29

With over a decade of experience, the hybrid International PHP Conference is the must-attend event for web developers from around the world to happen in Munich (and Online) this year.

• Jun 21: PHPFreaks' callout for this year's conference.

Longhorn PHP 2021 on Oct 14-16

Longhorn PHP is a 3-day tech conference brought to you by members of the PHP community to take place in Austin, TX.

• May 31: Official Longhorn PHP 2021 - Call For Paper Open.

Laravel Worldwide Meetup on May 25

The official worldwide Laravel meetup in the cloud, fully remote.

• Apr 28: Laravel Worldwide Meetup #8: Using Vite in Laravel & How to optimize your DB indexes

Laracon Online on Sep 1

The largest Laravel event of the year, streamed directly to you.

• Apr 2: The secrets behind the Laracon Online site. The Laracon Online hype may be over, but there are still some crispy news regarding the latest site and illustration.

Dutch PHP Conference on Jun 17-18

The annual Dutch Conference that usually takes place in the Netherworlds, this year was completely online. Tracks vary from PHP and Web Tech community.

• Jun 14: The time is come to get ready for the Dutch PHP Conference.

Security

• Jun 17: CVE-2021-32693: Symfony's authentication granted to all firewalls instead of just one.
• May 12: CVE-2021-21424: Symfony's preventing user enumeration in authentication mechanisms.
• Apr 28: Security: SQL Injection in SQL Server "LIMIT" / "OFFSET".
• Apr 27: CVE-2021-29472: The new Composer releases include fixes for a command injection security vulnerability on insufficiently sanitized URLs.

Projects

Laravel

Laravel is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax that takes the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in many web projects.

• Jul 7: Laravel 9 release dates with announced delay of Laravel 9.0 to Jan 2022.
• Jul 2: Livewire UI Spotlight is out! It's a Livewire component that provides Spotlight/Alfred-like launcher to your Laravel applications.
• Jun 24: Laravel v8.48 released with an on-demand filesystem disk, the ability to prune failed queue jobs, and the latest changes in the 8.x branch.
• Jun 15: New v5 of Laravel Event Sourcing with new changes such as a more consistent event handling, event queries, aggregate partials, command bus, and more.
• Jun 8: Cashier Stripe v13 Released with support for more payment methods and numerous other small improvements.
• Jun 4: Laravel v8.45 released with custom Blade echo handlers, model broadcasting, download assertions, and the latest changes in the 8.x branch.
• May 13: Laravel v8.41 released with cursor pagination, a new eloquent method to update models quietly, a new string method, and the latest changes in the 8.x branch.
• Apr 28: Laravel Scout V9 released with support for the open-source search API MeiliSearch.
• Apr 6: The Laravel Octane beta is now released—the highly-anticipated first-party package for running highly performant Laravel utilizing environments like Swoole and RoadRunner.

PHP

PHP is the popular general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to web development and we all love.

• Jul 5: PHP 8.1 is planned to be released on Nov 25, 2021.
• May 11: PHP will deprecate ticks. The tick mechanism in PHP: declare(ticks=1) was originally needed to track pcntl signals. Now you can use pcntl_signal() and pcntl_async_signals() for this. PHP 9 will remove it.
• Apr 24: PHP 8.1 will introduce a new IntlDatePatternGenerator class as a way to flexibly create localized date formats.
• Apr 23: PHP 8.1 will have a final modifier for constants, so that they cannot be overridden in child classes.

Ignition

Ignition is a beautiful and customizable error page and Laravel's (5.5 and newer) default error page.

• Jun 3: Ignition is going to receive an improved new design to deal with shared exceptions, overall display, and a simplified codebase. It's now in the idea phase.
• Apr 1: GitHub Dependabot identified a security vulnerability on Ignition concerning a remote code execution threat. Since the issue only happens when the app's debug mode, the team now displays a warning when devs are in a non-local environment.

Symfony

Symfony is a famous set of reusable PHP components and a PHP framework for web projects.

• Jun 17: Guard Component deprecation in Symfony 5.3 due to a more extensible authentication system.
• Ma 31: Symfony 5.3.0 released with various great features such as automatic config builder classes, support for negatable options, a new PasswordHasher component, new ways to generate UUIDs, and many many more.

Yii

Yii is a fast, secure, and efficient PHP framework. It's flexible yet pragmatic, works right out of the box, and has reasonable defaults.

• Jun 7: First version of yiisoft/rate-limiter package was released, which helps to prevent abuse by limiting the number of requests consequentially.
• May 5: New release of Yii Framework version 2.0.42 just fixing a handful of bugs throughout the project.

PHP Insights

PHP Insights is a static analysis tool to analyze the code quality of your PHP projects.

• Jun 22: PHPInsights v2 released with the ability to automatically fix proposed insights, PHP 8 support, faster analysis, and more!

Livewire Tables

Livewire Tables is a dynamic table component for Laravel Livewire.

• Jun 21: The most recent version v1.10 brings neat features such as column selection, drag/drop reordering, date filters, and more.

data-transfer-object

Data transfer objects for PHP projects with batteries included.

• Jun 1: Data Transfer Object v3 has been released which makes it easy to create objects that have a certain shape. Properties can even be validated.

commonmark

• Jul 6: The PHP League commonmark Markdown parser released a beta 3 version of the upcoming v2.0.0 stable release (likely July). This package is a highly-extensible PHP Markdown parser which fully supports the CommonMark and GFM specs.

Trending Topics

New Release of PHP 8.1 (9)

There's a lot of talk around the RFCs for the next release of PHP, the v8.1.

• PHP version stats: July, 2021
  • Brent
  • A nice article over the latest statistics of the percentage of PHP versions being used throughout the world by the developers.
• What's new in PHP 8.1
  • Brent
  • Another article from stitcher.io over the latest agreed changes for the next version of PHP (8.1). Even though a lot of the changes are still being discussed, the article explores what's already approved.

Standout Content

• Interview with Yii Core Team Lead about Yii Framework 3

  • Kilderson Sena
  • An awesome chat with Alexander Makarok (aka samdark), the Yii Core Team Lead, in Yii Slack on many things about the Yii 3 version.

• Laravel is 10 years old!

  • Eric L. Barnes
  • Jun 9th is officially the tenth birthday of the first beta release of Laravel, and we've come a long way in those ten years. That's a greta blog post on the summary of all these years.

• PhpStorm now includes Code with Me

  • Eric L. Barnes
  • JetBrains, the company behind PhpStorm and other IDEs, has announced the public launch of the Code With Me service to enable collaborative development and pair programming across the majority of JetBrains IDEs.