The TutsPlus.com site has continued their series looking at using the Pusher real-time communication service in your PHP application with a new tutorial. In this latest article, they show the use of presence channels, a feature that makes it simpler to know which users are connected to which channels.

In this series, we've been learning about Channels from Pusher, a platform that allows you to give your users the seamless real-time experience they want.

Presence channels build on the security provided by private channels, but they add the benefit of knowing which users are subscribed and connected to that channel. The best part is how easy it is to implement and use presence channels, and it's even easier if you've already configured your app to use private channels.

As in the previous articles in the series, they've provided both a screencast of the tutorial and the text-based version. They show how to modify the server you've already created to authorize a user and send that information along with the messages back to the Pusher service. They also include the changes to the frontend client to gather and send user information.

TutsPlus.com has posted the next part of their series covering the use of "channels" with Pusher, the real-time messaging service. In the previous article they introduced Pusher and its "channels" functionality to build a simple real-time chat. In this new tutorial they show how to modify this application to use private channels.

n this series, we've been learning about Channels from Pusher, a platform that allows you to give your users the seamless real-time experience they want.

Private channels provide your applications with a secure, private medium for publishing messages. The best part is how easy it is to implement and use private channels for your apps.

Much like the previous article, they've included a screencast of the entire process right along side the text version. The tutorial walks you through setting up the server (the ChannelsController), the endpoint for client authorization and the changes to make to the client itself.

In the latest part of his series covering Laravel 5.3, Matt Stauffer has posted this new tutorial covering the new notification system in the latest version of the popular Laravel framework.

In a previous blog post I've covered Laravel's new Mailable feature, which introduces some important changes to how we send mail in Laravel. I'd recommend at least skimming it if you haven't read it yet. In short, the preferred mail syntax is no longer sending mail using the "classic" mail closures, but instead creating a "Mailable" class for each message you want to send—for example, the "WelcomeNewUser" mailable class.

In Laravel 5.3, we have another new feature for communicating with our users: Notifications.

This notification system makes it simpler to send messages to your user when you don't care as much how they get it, just that they do. He walks you through the creation of your first notification class and breaks it down into its main parts, explaining each one. He shows how to define the different handlers for the notification types (like "toEmail") and how to trigger the notification, passing in either a single user or all users in the system. He then talks about the channels that are available to notifications and how to integrate several including Nexmo, database and the "broadcast" channel.

On the Laravel News site there's a new post talking about a new community effort that's been started in the Laravel ecosystem centering around notification channels. A "notification channel" is a method used to interact directly with your users - in this case using Pusher notifications via a simplified interface.

Laravel 5.3 will ship with a notification system that includes a Nexmo SMS driver, a Mail driver, and the ability to include custom drivers. Now that we have this system built-in we can use the new Pusher service from inside our Laravel applications.

All we need to do is to create a custom driver and that’s it, we’ll be able to send Push notifications to our Mobile devices right away. With the help of Freek Van der Herten and Marcel Pociot we managed to build an easy to use driver for Pusher Push Notifications.

The Pusher system not only allows sending messages to you users via the web but also push notifications to mobile devices (iOS and Android). A simple code snippet is included showing the Laravel-centric interface to the functionality and a link to more code examples on a GitHub repository. The post ends with a brief section about creating customer drivers as well.

On the TNT Studio site they've posted a tutorial showing you how to automate scheduled tasks and output to Slack, the popular online communication tool (think IRC for the web). They show how to use a simple webhook setup to relay the results of a task back to a given channel.

What many of us grow accustomed to is having cron job output emailed to us in order to see if everything went ok. Laravel's task scheduler also supports emailing output of the commands but if you are like millions of developers out there then you are probably using Slack and it's possible that it crossed your mind that it would be great if we could get output of the cron command sent to Slack. So let's do that.

They then walk you through the setup of the Slack notifier class to send the data to Slack via a Guzzle POSTed request. The next portion puts this code to work and creates the code to execute the command and return the results. The "after" event is then used to make the Slack request and output the results to the waiting channel.

The Laravel project has traditionally held discussions about the internals of the framework in an IRC channel on the Freenode.net network. The decision was made recently, however, to move the development over to GitHub (most likely to make it more accessible).

There's already several issues that have been posted on the Issues list in the GitHub repository including things around:

• improving typecasting
• decoupling Carbon (the date handling library)
• a fluent interface for validation
• enhancing the localization functionality

You can give feedback or start your own discussions by adding an issue to the list or just sharing your thoughts on current topics.

A new Laravel-centric podcast has started up and has posted its first episode: LaraChat Live. Their first recording if from a Google Hangout of a roundtable with host Shawn Mayzes and several other community members from the LaraChat Slack channel

Larachat Live is a live round table discussion from the Larachat community. We discuss PHP and Laravel as well as various other industry related topics.

This weeks discussion (our first round table) will include introductions from community members and our meet & greet outside of Larachat.co. This weekly round table will also include our discussion on PHPMD and PHPCS.

You can watch this episode either using the in-page video player or directly on YouTube. If you enjoy the show and want to keep up with future episodes, subscribe to their YouTube channel and you'll be notified as new videos are published (and when new shows are coming up).

A while back the SitePoint PHP blog did a survey asking for reader feedback about the content they provide, what they thought was good/bad about it and what they'd like to see more of in the future. In this new post they share some of these results.

On the last day of 2015, we published a survey asking you, the readers, for an opinion about the PHP channel. It was a pretty open survey with mostly freeform answers allowed, so you could tell us literally anything. All in all, we collected 78 responses so far (the survey will remain open indefinitely, in case someone wants to give us more feedback).

On the average satisfaction scale, we scored 7.42 out of 10, and that’s without excluding the potential trolls who voted 1. That’s a very good result, but we’re determined to improve it further.

The rest of the post then gets into the results in detail, talking about:

• overall satisfaction with the blog and its contents
• opinions on the newsletter
• author feedback
• favorite types of posts
• their presence on social media

They end the post with a summary of the things people wanted the most out of the site including more demos/practical examples and more PHP 7-related content. While these results are mostly applicable to the SitePoint PHP blog, they also can be applied a bit more widely across the community and on other sites that publish articles with technical content.

Hasin Hayder has posted a tutorial to his site showing you how to create a bot for Slack that will monitor your sales on Envato connected via their API.

Slack is awesome. Slack is the de-facto of modern team communication and I am pretty sure that this is not the first time you’re hearing something like this about slack. But if you’re really never used slack, oh boy, I feel pity for you. Anyway, in this article we’re going to make a slack bot that will monitor the sales in our envato account and notify from time to time as soon as someone purchased an item. Pretty useful, eh?

He shows how to make a new channel in your Slack instance (he uses "#sales") and how to add in a named webhook to connect the bot to. He then generates a token on the Envato service to access their API, giving it the needed permissions. He includes the simple curl-based script to make the request to the Envato API to get the latest results and then turn around and post it back to the Slack channel.

If you're a user of the Amazon AWS Web Services SDK software and are using the PEAR channel for installing the tool, you'll need to check out this new post to the AWS blog about its retirement.

There's been a noticeable wave of popular PHP projects recently announcing that they will no longer support PEAR as an installation method. Because the AWS SDK for PHP provides a PEAR channel, we've been very interested in the discussion in the community on PEAR channel support. PEAR has been one of the many ways to install the AWS SDK for PHP since 2010. While it's served us well, better alternatives for installing PHP packages are now available (i.e., Composer) and literally all of the PEAR dependencies of the AWS SDK for PHP are no longer providing updates to their PEAR channels.

He goes through several of the major dependencies the AWS SDK has (like Phirum, PHPUnit and Guzzle) and how they've announced the retirement of their own PEAR channels. Updates to the AWS SDK PEAR channel will cease on September 15th, 2014 but will still be available for downloads of older versions of the library. He also links to the location of the latest Phar and Zip archives if you'd like to use those.