PHP News Brief (Q3 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

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.

• Sep 8: Longhorn PHP is returning for its third year! Get your tickets.
• Sep 1: Unleashed Tech will be a member of the PHP community.

Laracon Online on Sep 1

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

• Jul 26: Speakers lineup and call for tickets.

PHPkonf 2021 Online on Sep 2

PHPkonf 2021 is a free community-organized PHP conference based in Turkey. This year they will gather online with 16 speakers in 2 parallel tracks to discuss PHP.

• Aug 9: PHP Magazine's callout for the conference!

Web Summer Camp on Sep 2-3

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

• Jul 16: Finally, here is the full #WEBSC program in Šibenik, Croatia!

CakeFest - THE CAKEPHP CONFERENCE on Oct 7-8

Every spring the Cake Software Foundation holds an annual conference dedicated to CakePHP, a benchmark framework for PHP development, providing developers with a full MVC stack solution to build powerful applications that scale.

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.

• Jul 21: Dev Events' callout for this year's conference.

SymfonyWorld Online 2021 Winter Edition on Dec 9-10

The third edition of the international online SymfonyWorld conference. The entire conference will take place online for 4 days in English.

• Sep 14: Call for Action: Submit your talk or workshop proposals at SymfonyWorld Online by Sept. 20th.

Security

• Aug 23: CVE-2021-39503: PHPMyWind 5.6 is vulnerable to remote code execution.

Projects

PHP

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

• Sep 16: PHP 8.1.0 RC 2 available for testing, the second release candidate. The next release is planned for Sep 30.

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.

• Sep 15: Laravel v8.61 released with a delete or fail() model method, a value or fail model method, assert if a model exists in a test and the latest changes in the v8.x branch.
• Sep 14: Livewire is getting lots of quality-of-life improvements in the latest release (v2.6), including deep model data binding, a new boot lifecycle hook, wireable objects, and more.
• Aug 17: Laravel Forge launched their first official command-line tool that gives you a nice set of commands to manage your Forge servers, sites, and more.
• Jul 28: Laravel v8.52 released with taking multiple items from a collection using shift or pop, a new validation rule to ignore trashed models, and the latest changes in the 8.x branch.
• Jul 20: The Laravel Docs now supports dark mode.
• Jul 20: The "State of Laravel" survey is out as an attempt to gain insight into the representation of the diverse technologies and behaviors of this outstanding community.
• Jul 19: Laravel v9 will be the next LTS version of Laravel, and it will be coming out sometime in early 2022. This post outlines all the new features and changes announced so far.

CakePHP

CakePHP is a development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like Associative Data Mapping, Front Controller, and MVC.

• Sep 12: The first release candidate of CakePHP 4.3.0 is out and will introduce several new features (including a JSON based logger, a new fixture subsystem for SQL migrations, and more) and a handful of deprecations.
• Sep 10: CakePHP 4.2.9 was released as a maintenance release for the 4.2 branch with several reported issues being fixed.
• Jul 24: The CakePHP core team announced the immediate availability of CakePHP 4.2.8, a maintenance release for the 4.2 branch that fixes several reported issues.

Symfony

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

• Sep 17: It's announced that, at the end of November 2021, both Symfony 5.4 and Symfony 6.0 will be released. Symfony 5.4 will still contain all deprecated features and you can use it in applications using those deprecated features. Symfony 6.0 will not.
• Aug 19: The end of Swiftmailer. The time has come to officially end the maintenance of Swiftmailer in favor of Symfony Mailer, whose maintenance will cease to end of November 2021.

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.

• Aug 20: Yii framework team continues to release packages for the upcoming Yii 3, such as yiisoft/data-response, yiisoft/view, and more.
• Aug 9: New release of Yii Framework version 2.0.43 includes a number of bug fixes as well as security enhancements and feature enhancements.

Joomla!

Joomla! is a famous PHP content management system (CMS), which enables you to build websites and powerful online applications.

• Aug 17: After 9 years of hard work by volunteers, the Joomla! Project proudly announces the release of their new major version, Joomla 4.0, alongside Joomla 3.10, known as “the bridge”.
• Jul 29: Joomla celebrates its 16th birthday along with the announcement of the planned release of Joomla! CMS 4.0 Stable and Joomla 3.10 Stable.

PhpStorm

PhpStorm is a cross-platform IDE that provides an editor for PHP, HTML, and JavaScript with on-the-fly code analysis, error prevention, and automated refactorings for PHP and JavaScript code.

• Sep 16: PhpStorm 2021.2 is released and introduces preliminary support for generics in PHP, enums for PHP 8.1, one-line array shapes, improved automatic formatting of PHP code, new inspections, refactorings, and much more.
• Jul 8: Although it's always been possible to run PHPStan and Psalm as external tools, the PhpStorm team is adding support to PhpStorm soon.

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

A highly-extensible PHP Markdown parser which fully supports the CommonMark and GFM specs.

• Aug 5: The PHP League commonmark Markdown parser released its version v2.0.0 which is 50% faster and consumes 21% less memory, plus three new great extensions for Front Matter, Description Lists, and Default HTML Attributes, and more.

Pest

Pest is a Testing Framework with a focus on simplicity. It was carefully crafted to bring the joy of testing to PHP.

• Aug 23: The famous PHP framework for testing introduced the official Parallel Testing plugin, which now integrates with Paratest to provide this functionality in a completely seamless way.

Paseto

PASETO stands for Platform-Agnostic Security Tokens and is a reference library for the implementation of PASETO in the PHP language.

• Aug 3: Paseto 2.0.0 is out, including a newer version of PHP requirement (7.1), as well as the GMP extension to be installed, and a change in the default protocol from Version2 to Version4.

Ray

Ray is a beautiful, lightweight desktop app that helps you debug your app with support to PHP, among other major languages.

• Sep 17: Announcing the initial release of the x-ray package for Ray, which provides a command-line utility that finds and displays calls to functions in PHP projects.

Trending Topics

New Release of PHP 8.1 (7)

People are getting more and more excited as the awaited release date of the new version of PHP (v8.1) approaches.

• PHP 8.1: before and after
  • Brent
  • The release of PHP 8.1 will be here within a few months, and once again there are many features to be excited! In this post, Brent shares the real-life impact that PHP 8.1 will have on his own code.

New Release of Laravel 9 (3)

There's a lot of expectation for the next new version of Laravel, v9, as well as the schedule for future ones.

• Laravel 9 Release Date
  • Taylor Otwell
  • The Laravel 9 release schedule was updated and has its next v9 to January 2022, with each subsequent version at least 1 year ahead.

Standout Content

• Launching PHP GitHub Sponsors

  • Dries Vints
  • Dries Vints, along with Tom Witkowski, launched the PHP GitHub Sponsors, a package for PHP to interact with the GitHub Sponsors GraphQL API, that allows you to do ACL based checks to see if one GitHub account is sponsoring another.

• ReactPHP and Amp join forces

  • RevoltPHP
  • With the addition of fibers in PHP 8.1, asynchronous PHP code may be a little easier and prettier. The maintainers of AsyncPHP and ReactPHP for asynchronous PHP have announced the RevoltPHP project.

• JetBrains released the state of the PHP Developer ecosystem in 2021

  • The JetBrains Team
  • JetBrains ran their yearly survey on all the things that devs like and use. This year's results for the PHP ecosystems include PHP 7.4 as the most popular version so far, Laravel as the most popular framework with 67% of the shares, and much more.