On his Medium.com site D. Nagy Gergo shares some "neat Laravel features" he's come across in his time developing with the framework.

We passed a year again, (oh, Happy New Year, before we forget), so we decided to collect some features from the Laravel framework that added in the previous year.

There were two big version changes, 5.4 in January and 5.5 in August. Of course, the big releases brought huge changes, but we try to focus on those that added during the year, without any bigger announcement.

In his list he includes functionality like:

• the "tap" and "when" methods for collection handling
• API route handling
• new Blade directives around Guards
• using "artisan" to build out correct model factories
• the "firstWhere" method to find and return the first match in a model

Each of the items in the list include a brief summary of the feature and a link to more information about it in the manual.

On their blog, RIPS Technologies have shared a wrap-up of their security advent calendar shared at the end of last year. The calendar provided a daily challenge related to a PHP security issue that may or may not be commonly known.

In this years PHP Security Advent Calendar we published 24 challenges for the PHP community where security issues were hidden in code snippets for fun and training. The challenges are based on real-world security vulnerabilities that we found with the help of RIPS over the last year in popular PHP applications. In this blog post we are going to discuss the main take-aways from our advent calendar regarding PHP security.

The calendar covered several different types of challenges but they fell into a few overall categories: issues with user input, weak typing, odd behavior of built-in features and the overall diversity of possible bugs.

The root cause for the security issues presented in our challenges are not new. But the diversity and combination of these pitfalls are sheer endless that trick even skilled developers. What looks secure at first sight quickly turns into an exploitable security bug. [...] We would like to thank everyone who participated, discussed, and provided great feedback and we hope our challenges helped in sharpening your security skills in a fun way!

The Laravel News site has posted a look back at their content for all of 2017 and have linked to the best based on their popularity over the year.

Here’s a look at the most popular articles we wrote this year, including the major release of Laravel 5.5, command line tips, Vue.js tutorials, bash tricks, and of course, popular Laravel tutorials.

The list includes articles like:

• 13 Laravel Admin Panel Generators
• Vue.js Tutorial: From jQuery to Vue.js
• Bootstrap 4 Laravel Preset for Laravel 5.5
• Maximize Your Terminal Productivity

Check out the full post for the complete list and a brief summary for each.

Jordi Boggiano is back with the latest round of his PHP version statistics as gathered from the information provided by the Composer package management tool for PHP.

It's stats o'clock! See 2014, 2015, 2016.1, 2016.2 and 2017.1 for previous similar posts.

A quick note on methodology, because all these stats are imperfect as they just sample some subset of the PHP user base. I look in the packagist.org logs of the last month for Composer installs done by someone. Composer sends the PHP version it is running with in its User-Agent header, so I can use that to see which PHP versions people are using Composer with.

He then shares the results of the statistics including the total number of users for each version of the language and the difference in just the last 6-7 months. PHP 7.1 has pulled out as a front-runner with PHP 7.0 coming in closely after. He also shows some historical data showing the decline of the 5.x versions and the rise of 7.x versions over the past years. The post ends with information about the percentage of requirements in packages with 5.6 taking the lead but not by much.

The Laravel News site has a new post today sharing the results of the 2017 Laravel survey posted a while back. The survey asked the Laravel (and non-Laravel) community about the framework, what they like about it and what they'd like to see in the future.

Back in September, we partnered with LaraJobs to run a Laravel survey to see what types of projects people are taking on with Laravel as well as get some feedback on what the Laravel community could be doing better. The results ended up with over 2,700 submissions and some interesting insights.

You can see the complete results on this 2017 Laravel Survey Results page and thanks for everyone who took the time to fill it out.

The results include answers to questions like:

• why Laravel was selected over others
• what size projects it was being used for
• if you were able to find the Laravel developers needed (and of the right quality)
• size of the business using the framework

Check out the full results for answers to these and other questions from the survey.

Jordi Boggiano, author and lead developer on the Composer project has posted his latest updates sharing the PHP version statistics for the first part of 2017.

It's stats o'clock! See 2014, 2015, 2016.1 and 2016.2 for previous similar posts.

A quick note on methodology, because all these stats are imperfect as they just sample some subset of the PHP user base. I look in the packagist.org logs of the last month for Composer installs done by someone. Composer sends the PHP version it is running with in its User-Agent header, so I can use that to see which PHP versions people are using Composer with.

He starts with the differences between now and the last time he ran the stats with a nice trends towards the PHP 7.x releases, especially PHP 7.1. He shares some graphs of the overall version distribution and a time-related graph showing changes in usage over time. Finally, he ends the post the same way as the others showing requirements of packages and how they've changed since the last update (what version a package requires).

Each year the StackOverflow site posts a survey for developers to record their current feelings, thoughts and background. They've posted the results for this year's survey with the results from over 64,000 developers worldwide.

Each year since 2011, Stack Overflow has asked developers about their favorite technologies, coding habits, and work preferences, as well as how they learn, share, and level up. This year represents the largest group of respondents in our history: 64,000 developers took our annual survey in January.

As the world’s largest and most trusted community of software developers, we run this survey and share these results to improve developers’ lives: We want to empower developers by providing them with rich information about themselves, their industry, and their peers. And we want to use this information to educate employers about who developers are and what they need.

They start by share some high level points they learned from this year's results. The remainder of the post is the results presented in a more easily consumable graph/chart form. You can, of course, download the data yourself if you're interested in running reports of your own.

The Laravel News site has posted a recap of the Laravel Online conference that happened back on March 8th (2017).

The first Laracon Online conference just wrapped up and based on feedback many loved the event. I want to personally thank the Laravel community for helping make this a reality.

[...] We had developers from all over the world hanging out in Slack, watching the live stream, and socializing. It got a little crazy at times but everyone behaved, and it was fun watching the room scroll so fast that even the world champion speed reader would have trouble keeping up.

The post includes feedback from the attendees of the conference, a brief summary of each of the talks presented and a list of sponsors and other resources to get more detail on the event.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post sharing the current state of PHP MVC frameworks in 2017. The article doesn't focus on any particular list of frameworks (though the more popular ones are used in the examples) and instead focus on the overall trends they've seen in frameworks and their use.

A simple question prompted me to sit down and write this follow up to my article from about a year ago: "Any thoughts about where things are today?"

He suggests that, while several of the major frameworks are still in active development and are seeing new features in recent versions, the front-runners are probably Laravel and Symfony. He includes trend numbers to back this up (popularity, basically) but also briefly touches on others: CakePHP, CodeIgniter and Zend Framework 2. He then breaks it down into two groups: Symfony/Laravel and "the rest". The post wraps up with a look at the rise of microservices, the "destruction of the monolith" and a more recent emphasis on scalability over just features.

The Delicious Brains site has posted the latest part in their "Hosting WordPress Yourself" series (originally started back in 2015). In this latest tutorial they update things based on the current status of the WordPress project and share some of the considerations that need to be made when self-hosting versus something like WordPress.com.

It’s been 2 years since I started writing the Hosting WordPress Yourself series, and in that time a lot has changed! If you had tried following along with the series recently you will probably have noticed that a few of the steps outlined in the articles no longer worked, or were no longer relevant. A few exciting new technologies and services have also been introduced over the last few years (e.g. PHP 7.1, Let’s Encrypt, HTTP/2) which can improve both the performance and security of your sites. As such, Brad suggested that I update the entire series to reflect what’s changed over the last couple of years.

The existing articles in this series have already been updated with the changes that follow. This article serves as a changelog and documents what’s changed in each article.

They then go through the major updates that need to be made to the previous advice covering including topics like:

• Setting Up a Virtual Server
• Installing Nginx, PHP and MariaDB
• Server Monitoring and Caching
• Cron, Email and Automatic Backups
• Nginx Security Tweaks, WooCommerce Caching, and Auto Server Updates

Check out the full post for the complete advice.