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

• HHVM Blog: HHVM 3.24 (End of PHP 5 Support)

• Laravel News: Laracon US 2018 Announces Speaker Robert C Martin
• Laravel News: Install Microsoft SQL Drivers for PHP 7 in Docker
• Brandon Savage: Don’t write useless unit tests
• Martin Hujer: Have you tried Composer Scripts? You may not need Phing.
• PHP Town Hall Podcast: Episode 56: GraphQL is better than REST
• Matthias Noback: Simple CQRS - reduce coupling, allow the model(s) to evolve
• Exakat Blog: PHP assertions and their usage
• Oscar Merida: Creating ZIP files and streaming the response with Silex
• Stitcher.io Blog: Where a curly bracket belongs
• Matthias Noback: Setting the stage: Code complexity
• Christoph Rumpel: How I redesigned my blog and moved it from Jekyll to Laravel
• Sergey Zhuk: Managing ReactPHP Promises
• Pineco.de: Simple Eloquent Model Translations
• Freek Van der Herten: How to send a "trial expiring soon" mail in Laravel Spark
• Joe Ferguson: How to move a dependency to Composer while requiring an old version
• Colin O'Dell: Optimizing colinodell/json5 with Blackfire

Latest PECL Releases:

• pq 2.1.5
  * Fix PHP-7.3 compatibility

• datadog_trace 0.9.1
  ### Added - Ability to reset all overrides via `dd_trace_reset`

  Changed

  • By default do not throw an exception when method or function doesn't exist

  Fixed

  • Eloquent integration calling protected performInsert method
• mcrypt 1.0.2
  - The mcrypt extension as it was in PHP 7.1, before it was removed from core.
• gRPC 1.18.0RC1
  - gRPC C Core 1.18 uptake

The Laravel News site has posted an announcement about the latest in their series of Laracon events: Laracon Online 2019.

Laracon Online 2019 is coming to a couch near you on March 6th, 2019! Back and better than ever in this 2019 edition, you will hear from the likes of Laravel creator Taylor Otwell, Tighten Partner and Laracon US speaker Matt Stauffer, Refactoring UI tag-team Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger, Laracon US speakers Freek Van Der Herten and Samantha Geitz, and Laracon 2018 EU speaker Marcel Pociot.

Just like last year, the event is hosted entirely online and the event is super affordable for the early bird price of $12. No hotels, no airfare, just signup and spend the day watching some of the best speakers right from your computer.

And there's good news for those out there wanting to attend the event - they're giving away 355 tickets for free based on the generous donations from several sponsors. Naturally, if you can afford the $12 (that's like 2 cups of fancy coffee!) then don't enter the drawing. They want as many people as possible to enjoy the event. If you're interested in the kind of content presented at these events, check out last year's talks or just head over and get your ticket now.

Matt Glaman has written up a post for his site showing how you can write better Drupal code using PHPStan, the PHP static analysis tool.

PHP is a loosely typed interpreted language. That means we cannot compile our scripts and find possible execution errors without doing explicit inspections of our code. It also means we need to rely on conditional type checking or using phpDoc comments to tell other devs or IDE what kind of value to expect. Really there is no way to assess the quality of the code or discover possible bugs without thorough test coverage and regular review.

If you use PhpStorm, you will notice all of their helpers which analyze your code and add static analysis. [...] That's awesome. It's pretty amazing that PhpStorm and a few plugins can give us some stability in our PHP code.

While the functionality in PhpStorm is useful, there are some pitfalls including the fact that everyone would have to use PhpStorm. He makes the suggestion that PHPStan can effectively replace these helpers and, with a bit of customization, provide just as much quality control for your Drupal code. He links over to a custom PHPStan extension for Drupal and an example YAML configuration. He also includes helpful tips around bootstrapping the autoloader, return typing and changes it provides for using the entity manager.

In a new post to his site Tomas Votruba walks you through the process he followed for moving his site [away from the Jekyll static site generator over to Statie], PHP-based static site generator.

Jekyll is great to start for micro websites like gomonorepo.org and <a href="https://gophp71.org/>gophp71.org from Jekyll to Statie. Can new init command make this piece of cake? And what needs to be done next?

He goes through each step of the process (nine of them), providing code and configuration examples along the way:

• Create Basic Statie Structure
• Move Source files to /source Directory
• Move Parameters Files Under parameters > [param name] Sections
• Upgrade Absolute Links to Moved Files
• Load Moved YAML Files in statie.yml
• Remove site.data. and use Variables Directly
• Setup Github Pages deploy in Travis
• Clean Metadata from Headers

The final step in the process are the commands to run the project locally and ensure that everything it working as expected before deployment.

On the Laravel News site Tim MacDonald has written up a post sharing some tips on how you can speed up your PHPUnit tests, making them easier to run and more useful during the development process.

Having a fast test suite can be just as important as having a fast application. As a developer, getting feedback quickly about the state of your code allows for a much quicker development turnaround. Here we are going to run through some tips you can implement today to make your tests run faster.

The example test suites have been made intentionally slow to simulate a broader set of tests and also to emphasize the improvements possible. Your real-world mileage may vary.

He makes recommendations around the use of ParaTest to run the tests in parallel, re-running only failed tests, grouping slow tests, lowering the password hash "rounds" count and disabling XDebug. Each item in the list includes instructions on what changes need to be made and screenshots of the results of the change.

On the Sticher.io blog Brendt has written up a guide looking forward to PHP's next major release and what's planned to be included in PHP 7.4.

PHP 7.4 will probably be released somewhere December 2019. tagged: language php74 features lookahead rfc planned

Link: https://stitcher.io/blog/new-in-php-74