On the php[architect] site they've posted an article from the September 2017 issue - the "Community Corner" from James Titcumb all about the return of PHP TestFest.

There is a new movement in the PHP community! Well, it isn’t exactly new, but an event called PHP TestFest is back. PHP TestFest is a global event organized by the PHP community at large, where an effort is made each time to increase the test coverage of the PHP engine itself. Around eight or nine years ago, user groups around the world coordinated to organize events spanning a few months each year, with some groups continuing events annually for several years after.

The article goes on to talk about some of the reasoning behind the TestFest and how you can help to set up an event for a local group to contribute. It then goes through the format of tests, creating new ones and how to execute them to test the result. You can find out more about PHP TestFest and how you can get involved on the main PHP TestFest site.

The WordPress project has posted a new release that includes some security fixes and general maintenance changes.

WordPress 4.8.2 is now available. This is a security release for all previous versions and we strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.

WordPress versions 4.8.1 and earlier are affected by [several] security issues.

Issues include problems with prepared statements in SQL statements, XSS issues in several features, path traversal vulnerabilities as well as open redirect flaws. It's recommended that all WordPress users upgrade to this release to prevent exploit of these vulnerabilities either by downloading the latest release or by upgrading via the internal dashboard.

Asmir Mustafic has posted a guide on his site showing how to create custom error codes in the API responses from your Symfony-based application.

When writing APIs, a proper error handling is fundamental. HTTP status codes are a great start, but often when we deal with user inputs is not enough. If out model has complex validation rules, understanding the reason behind an 400 Bad Request error can be not trivial.

Fortunately when for symfony developers there are many libraries to deal with it. Symfony Validator, <a href="https://github.com/symfony/form>Symfony Form, <a href="https://github.com/FriendsOfSymfony/FOSRestBundle>FOS REST Bundle and JMS Serializer combined allows you to have nice error messages to be shown to your users.

He walks you through the code required to create the default error handling with an "author" example. This includes the creation of the entity as well as the form and controller to handle the request/response. He then refactors this away from the default to create the custom error handler with handlers for the message and code to be returned. The post ends with the configuration changes to register it with the application and what the result ends up looking like.

As this post to Laravel News mentions the upcoming v5.6 release of the framework will remove the artisan optimize functionality from the project's artisan command line tool.

The Artisan optimize command is deprecated as of 5.5, and a commit in master has already removed it from 5.6. Waiting until 5.6 gives you time to update your build scripts and composer.json files ahead of the release.

As of Laravel 5.5, the composer.json no longer references optimize in the post-install-cmd and post-update-cmd scripts. The Optimize command is still defined, but does nothing in 5.5.

The project has provided some reasoning behind the change, mostly having to do with the overall performance improvements in the PHP language itself. Additionally, there was some discussion around the removal before it was finalized.

Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:

• Alejandro Celaya: The PhpStorm plugins of my choice

• Dragos Holban: How to Setup Docker for Your Symfony Project
• BitPress Blog: My Simple Approach to using Docker and PHP
• HHVM Blog: The Future of HHVM
• Peter Lafferty: HTTP Request Validation With Silex
• Laravel News: Creating Your Own Configuration in Laravel
• Laravel News: Testing With PhpSpec
• Delicious Brains Blog: XAMPP vs MAMP vs Local vs DesktopServer: A Comparison Guide to Local Dev Envi
• Niklas Keller: An Introduction to Generators in PHP
• Sergey Zhuk: Promise-Based Cache With ReactPHP
• Loïc Faugeron: PragmatiClean - Command Bus
• Jason McCreary: SMS admin in 8 lines of code
• Mark Baker: Closures, Anonymous Classes and an alternative approach to Test Mocking (Part 3)
• Dev.to: Deploy Laravel Application On Cloud Easily With Cloudways
• Auth0 Blog: Building an app with Nette and adding authentication

In a post to his site Niklas Keller provides an introduction to generators in PHP. Generators provide more "just in time" functionality for looping (iterators) without the need to create a separate class to handle it.

Generators have been added to PHP in version 5.5, yet the have received rather low attention. The PHP 5.5 migration guide introduced them as way to implement simple iterators.

He shows the comparison of generators versus a foreach loop and discusses how the yield statement works and what benefits the generator gives over normal looping. He refactors the example to get a clearer picture into what's happening inside the generator, outputting a few strings when the next value is fetched. He then suggests that generators that are just used as iterators are "boring" and covers some more interesting features and uses (including handling of async operations).

The Dev.to blog has a tutorial posted from author Saquib Rizwan showing an easy way to deploy a Laravel application to Cloudways via their platform and the PHP stack they offer.

Even if you know all about it, setting up and configuring a dedicated server is a time consuming multi-step process. But thanks to managed hosting solutions available in the market today, setting up servers is no longer a major action item on project task lists.

Deploying Laravel application on cloud infrastructure is never been this fast and easy before. [...] Cloudways provides an incredible platform for Laravel Community. It makes it easy to deploy and host laravel applications so that developers can focus on the development process rather than worrying about deployment and server level issues.

The post lists out some of the benefits of the Cloudways platform before starting in on the technology behind their "ThunderStack" PHP environment. With the basics covered, Saquib then moves on to deploying the server via Cloudways, linking it to your application on GitHub and providing the proper key information for them to connect. With all of this in place, the "Start Deployment" button is ready for use and the application and server can be started quickly.

On the Auth0 blog there's a tutorial posted that shows you how to build an application with the Nette framework and easily integrate authentication via their own JSON web token functionality.

Nette is a free, open-source PHP framework designed for building web applications. Nette is a set of decoupled and reusable PHP packages that will make your work easier. And Nette is also known as the quick and comfortable web development framework in PHP because it has the tools that allow you to bang out PHP applications rather quickly.

[...] In this tutorial, I'll show you how easy it is to build a web application with Nette and add authentication to it. Check out the repo to get the code.

The tutorial starts by talking about some of the built-in tools the framework includes and some basic use of each. It then gets into building the application, creating the controller, view and template to output a list of characters from Game of Thrones. From there it moves into the authentication piece, showing the integration of the Auth0 plugin and how to hook it into an application on their platform. There's a bit of configuration to set it up as an authenticator but then the framework and the plugin take care of the rest.

In a new post to his site Jason McCreary shows how he integrated SMS for account administration for the Laravel Shift service. It's his method of providing good support for the project from anywhere, even when he's away from his machine.

In the end, all I need is a quick way to run a Shift on the go. Looking back on almost two years of support, I often have the Shift number readily available. Creating the job and adding it to the queue is at most two lines of code. So the steps are not the pain point.

The pain point is connecting to the server. [...] What do I carry around with me all the time? My phone. I’m already reviewing the support emails from my phone. Wouldn’t it be great when I need to run a Shift manually to just reply or send a text.

He then shares the code he used to create the administration interface via SMS through the Nexmo service. He uses the information the Nexmo service sends to hiswebhook via a special number and handles it via a special endpoint on his side. In this case the interface allows him to re-run a "shift" that was previously requested if there was an error. The code is pretty simple, made up of a controller and route for the endpoint and a "FormRequest" class for the message processing.

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

• Reddit.com: How is everyone doing development locally today?

• Remi Collet: Microsoft SQL Server from PHP
• Toptal.com: How Much Coding Should Designers Know?
• Freek Van der Herten: Taking care of backups with Laravel
• TutsPlus.com: Building Your Startup With PHP: Simplifying Onramp With OAuth
• Jason McCreary: Update PHP on Mac OS X
• Master Zend Framework: Whoops, I Forgot The Error Handler
• SitePoint PHP Blog: PHP-FIG Alternatives: The Pros and Cons of Various Visions
• Symfony Finland: Symfony & staying relevant: React.js rendering, GraphQL and Neo4j OGM
• PHP.net: PHP 7.1.0 Release Candidate 2 Released
• CloudWays Blog: Getting Started With Silex Micro-Framework On Cloud Hosting
• Voices of the ElePHPant: Interview with James Titcumb
• TutsPlus.com: Building a Welcome Page for Your WordPress Product: Code Part 1
• Raphael Stolt: Anatomy of a dope PHP package repository
• Laravel News Podcast: Episode 26 - Laravel 5.3.8, Spark 2, Lumen 5.3 and more!
• Symfony Blog: Symfony in the US: News from North America!
• Freek Van der Herten: Simplifying presenters in Laravel
• Loïc Faugeron: Mars Rover, Locating handler
• PHPUgly Podcast: Episode 28 - Evan Almighty