The Exakat service has posted their latest "PHP Index of Coding" for August 2018. In this index, they share statistics from the projects the service has analyzed and some trends based on the results.

Every month, Exakat runs thousands of analysis on half a million lines of PHP code. This is primarily for testing purpose, a kind of torture test that checks the engine run on any kind of code. And it is very useful to ensure all situations are correctly handled.

We also extracted the following stats out of 1700+ projects, analysis by analysis. This way, any issue may be ranked from ‘wide spread’ to ‘very unusual’. In fact, ‘wide spread’ may also be understood as : ‘almost a feature’. May be we can suggest a few of them to wiki.php.net.

They include both the latest results and how they compare from the previous entries from May 2018. Analysis points include things like:

• Used Once Variables (In Scope)
• PHP Keywords As Names
• Property Used In One Method Only
• Unitialized Properties
• Should Make Ternary
• Use Named Boolean In Argument Definition
• Assigned Twice
• Locally Unused Property

...and many more. Some of the changes from May are pretty dramatic but others have stayed about the same. Check out the full post for the overview and links to more information about each of the checks.

php[architect] magazine has posted the announcement of the release of their August 2018 issue: Masterful Code Management.

This issue includes articles like:

• "Debugging PHP With Xdebug" by Mark Niebergall
• "Pro Parsing Techniques with PHP, Part Three: Using Regular Expressions" by Michael Schrenk
• "MySQL Generated Columns, Views, and Triggers" by Dave Stokes

All of the usual columns are back too including tips for using PhpStorm, using gitflow, secure token management and PHP community. You can pick up a copy to call our own from the php[architect] site and, if you're curious about the contents and want to "try before you buy", they've posted a free PDF of the "Using Regular Expressions" article to give you a taste.