Geshan Manandhar has a new post talking about five development improvements that were "rediscovered" in 2013 in the PHP community.

Love it or hate it, the fact is 80% of the web is PHP and its usage has been in an increasing trend since 2010. [...] In this process of having a robust back-end API, we have rediscovered and utilized some technologies inline with PHP development and improved on them in the past year. Here is a summary of these PHP related technologies/methods/best practices that will help all PHP developers.

The five things on his list are things that were around before 2013, but they all had much more of an effect in the past year than prior:

• PHP Specification Request - PSR
• Composer and Packagist
• Virtual Development Environment - Vagrant
• Debugging with X-Debug
• Automated Testing with PHPUnit

On Reddit.com there's a recent post looking forward in PHP's future and asking the community what their predictions are for the language in the upcoming year. Comments run the range of trolling to useful, but here's some of the more interesting ones:

• "hopefully we finally see a bake-in of APC into the PHP core? Maybe?"
• "Hopefully it will catch up with the testability of Ruby."
• "PHP is becoming more professional, with better tools and processes. I hope people move towards PHP 5.4 as I love array literals/really dislike not having them."
• "I know python has been making good use of for a long time. So hopefully this sort of stuff continues."
• "I wish the PHP frameworks would embrace the PHP development server."
• "PHP 5.3 will become deployed on the majority of servers, thus allowing to actually utilize its new features in distributable FLOSS projects."

Share your own predictions and add your own comments to the post!