The php.net site has posted an announcement about the latest Release Candidate for the PHP 7.1.x series: PHP 7.1.0 RC 3:

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.1.0 Release Candidate 3. This release is the third release candidate for 7.1.0. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system.

[...] For more information on the new features and other changes, you can read the NEWS file, or the UPGRADING file for a complete list of upgrading notes. These files can also be found in the release archive.

As a reminder, this is a preview release and is NOT designed to be used in production . The release schedule is provided on the wiki, the next Release Candidate will be coming in early October (the 10th) with three more following. The target release date for PHP 7.1.0 is sometime in the later part of November.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted their latest interview with a member of the PHP community. In this latest show host Cal Evans talks with Jeremy Mikola at the 2016 edition of the php[tek] conference.

Cal and Jeremy talk about Jeremy's keynote at php[tek] 2016 and how it came to be. They also talk about the tradition Jeremy helped start related to PHP conferences: Wurstcon.

You can listen to this latest show either by using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. To get the latest updates when new episodes are released, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter.

In a new post to his site Jason McCreary has posted an update to his previous "installing Apache, MySQL and PHP" post with a few changes for macOS Sierra. The changes don't make the installation too much different, however.

Mac OS X runs atop UNIX. So most UNIX software installs easily on Mac OS X. Furthermore, Apache and PHP come packaged with OS X. To create a local web server, all you need to do is configure Apache and install MySQL.

I am aware of the web server software available for Mac OS X, notably MAMP. These get you started quickly. But they forego the learning experience and, as most developers report, can become difficult to manage.

He walks you through the process of getting Apache up and running and the current version of PHP configured and working with it. He shows how to verify PHP is working as expected, how to install the DMG of MySQL and make it also work happily with the PHP installation. There's also a bit at the end you can enable to add in some additional Apache module support for mod_rewrite, mod_expires and mod_deflate.

Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:

• Laravel News: Troubleshooting Laravel Valet on macOS Sierra

• Michelangelo van Dam: PHP 7 on macOS Sierra
• SitePoint PHP Blog: Mail Logging in Laravel 5.3: Extending the Mail Driver
• SitePoint PHP Blog: Single-File Symfony Apps? Yes, with MicroKernelTrait!
• Symfony Blog: Symfony Reaches 500 Million Downloads
• Master Zend Framework: How to Build a Docker Test Environment
• SitePoint PHP Blog: Quick Intro: PhpCompatibility for PHPCS – Are You PHP7 Ready?
• Eleven Labs: Use the Symfony Workflow Component
• Kyle Mitchell: The MIT License, Line by Line
• Voices of the ElePHPant: Interview with Jeff Gerrling
• Loïc Faugeron: Mars Rover, Locating refactoring
• PHPUgly Podcast: Episode 29 - Merlin Magical Sleep Sack
• SitePoint PHP Blog: 9 Hot Tips to Enhance Your Spark Experience

The Eleven Labs site has a new tutorial posted showing you how to use the Symfony workflow component, a component designed to help make performing a sequence of operations simpler.

Since Symfony 3.2, a new useful component was born: the Workflow component.

It is indeed really convenient and can simplify greatly your developments when you have to manage status workflows in your application, that occurs a lot.

The tutorial starts by helping you get the Workflow component installed (via Composer) and an example configuration defining a flow for a pull request. They then show the command to generate the flow graph so you can ensure the workflow is correct. From there example code is provided to use the workflow and do things like:

• checking if you can transition to a certain state
• get the list of enabled transitions
• event handling

Code examples and configuration options are also included for these points, helping you to make your workflow even more flexible.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted an article for the Laravel Spark users out there, sharing their top nine tips for getting the most out of the popular "boilerplate" tool.

A while ago, I wrote about a product I wanted to build, to allow easy remote backups for Pagekit sites. I’ve been working on it (periodically) since then, and have come across a few interesting bits of advice.

I decided to use Laravel Spark as the foundation for the product, and I thought it would be helpful to share the advice. Whether you’re just starting your Spark app, or are in maintenance mode, I think you’ll find some of these tips useful!

His tips cover a wide range of the product's features:

• You Don’t Have to Keep All the Base Files
• Use Simple Repositories
• Don’t use caret (^) Laravel dependencies
• Host on Forge
• Re-Arrange Middleware

Each of these comes with a description and, where appropriate, a bit of code to help clarify the point.

If you’re on the fence about trying Spark, I can recommend it. It’s given my product a head-start it wouldn’t have had otherwise. Hopefully these tips will save you even more time.

It's that time of year again - the perfect time to get involved in Open Source. Why? Because DigitalOcean is back with Hacktoberfest once again, encouraging contributions to Open Source no matter the size.

The Laravel News site sums it up nicely:

Hacktoberfest, the month-long festival of code, is back again this year. The event is hosted in partnership between GitHub and DigitalOcean, and the rules are simple. If you make four pull requests between October 1st and October 31st, you’ll get a t-shirt. It’s available worldwide with no stipulations.

While the real incentive is to get more contributions to Open Source project, there's also a side benefit for those that get in their four pull requests during October: a cool t-shirt bearing the logo for this year's event. All you have to do is contribute and four pull requests to any repository (not your own ideally) before the end of October. If you're not sure of where to start and need some ideas, the Hacktoberfest site has you covered with some great suggestions to get you started.

Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:

• Laravel News: Homestead now with PHP 7 support

• Voices of the ElePHPant: Interview with Mikhail Vink
• PHP.net: PHP 5.5.30 & 5.6.14 Released
• php[architect]: October 2015 Issue Released - Integrating Extensions
• Symfony Blog: Pre-conference workshops at SymfonyCon Paris 2015 are announced!
• Scott Keck-Warren: Making dataProviders More Maintainable
• PHP.net: PHP 7.0.0 RC 4 Released
• Thijs Feryn: Interviewing Kristof De Jaeger and discussing Drupal 8 & Drupalcon
• SitePoint PHP Blog: Flexible and Easily Maintainable Laravel + Angular Material Apps
• Marc Morera: Composer Install in CI
• SitePont PHP Blog: How to Quickly Build a Chat App with Ratchet
• Lorna Mitchell: New in PHP 7: null coalesce operator
• Shameer C: Slim 3: Replacing Pimple with Aura.Di
• Matt Stauffer: How to Apply for a Web Developer Job at Tighten (and How Not To)
• Kevin Schroeder: Configuring MySQL SSL in Magento
• Hannes Van De Vreken: Why You Should Avoid Over-Abstracting
• 7PHP.com: The #ZendCon Interview | The Unique 2015 Edition of ZendCon
• Voices of the ElePHPant: Interview with Chris Spruck (#2)
• Symfony Blog: Discontinuing the Symfony Community Translations
• ThePHP.cc: Dependencies in Disguise

The SitePoint PHP blog has an interesting tutorial posted from author Deji Akala showing you how to create a "single file Symfony application" using the MicroKernelTrait, a recently added piece of functionality that, while added for other uses, can be easily adapted to make a "Single File Application".

A Single Page Application (SPA) offers a desktop experience to users of a web application by loading a single HTML page, and dynamically updating it as required without reloading. However, a Symfony application may have hundreds of classes, and in a basic application we end up with lots of files we don’t really need.

The latest versions of Symfony (2.8 and 3.0) introduce us to the concept of a Single File Application (SFA) – a super-slim application or micro-framework implemented in one file.

The tutorial is then broken down into three steps towards creating this application:

• Step 1: Install Barebones Symfony
• Step 2: The Front Controller
• Step 3: The Kernel Class

The last step in that process is where most of the code is created and the work is done. It helps you build out the "SfaKernel" class (using MicroKernelTrait), add a few basic routes and the handlers to match them. There's also a bit about container configuration and adding in other bundles you might need. The tutorial finishes out with a look at potential use cases for a single file application like this such as microservices.

The Master Zend Framework site continues their series covering the creation of a Docker-based testing environment in this second part highlighting the addition of testing support.

In the first part in this series on developing web applications using Docker, we saw how to create a local development environment using Docker; one ideally suited to creating Zend Expressive (or any other kind of PHP-based web application). But, what we didn’t cover was how to handle testing in a Docker-based environment.

[...] How do you run tests when working with Docker containers? After a bit of searching, I found that it’s not that difficult. But you have to use the right combination of commands.

Since unit tests can be run locally if need be (they shouldn't need any resources from the service if they're true unit tests) he focuses on acceptance testing. For his examples he uses the Codeception testing tool. He walks you through the setup of some simple tests based on the "home" page functionality of the Zend Expressive skeleton application. With that in place, he shows the updates that will need to be made to execute the tests from outside the instance via a "docker exec" call. The post finishes with a look at adding two other tools to the mix as well: Make and Phing.