As is mentioned in this new post to the Symfony blog, the latest milestone release of the popular framework has been made - Symfony 2.3.0.

We were all waiting for it and many of us have been working hard for the last four years to make it happen. Today, Symfony 2.3.0 is available and this is the first long-term support release for Symfony version 2. I'm so happy that we were able to achieve this important milestone in the life of the framework. THANK YOU for making it possible. [...] That gives us the best of two different worlds: small teams and agile companies can benefit from the latest features by upgrading every six months (they have two months to upgrade); large teams and traditional companies can standardize on a release. [...] And 2.3.0 is our first long term support release. We, the community, are going to maintain it for the next three years (until May 2016).

The post includes some statistics about this latest release as well as some of the new features that come along with it. For those that want to upgrade right away, there's also some instructions on what to change in your "composer.json" file to try it all out.

The Developer Tutorials website has started up a blog and has already posted some great content to it including this new post covering five things that every PHP coder should know about development.

There's always a bridge between textbook knowledge of programming - syntax, procedure etc. - and the real world knowledge that you get from actually developing real applications. Here are five things every PHP developer should be familiar with before they begin developing web applications in PHP

The list is:

• Frameworks
• Templating engines Code availability
• Don't reinvent the wheel
• IRC is a wonderful thing

I'm a particular fan of that last one and regularly hang out in the same ##php channel over on Freenode.