The "24 Days in December" project has returned this year, sharing opinions and insights from members of the PHP community, one article posted each day. They've been running since December 1st and there's some great content in this year's batch already:

• How to become a good maintainer
• https://24daysindecember.net/2018/12/09/finite-resources-vs-infinite-knowledge/
• Open Source and Squeegee Men
• A love letter to legacy projects
• How a user group can change your live
• PHP and the secrets of emergent architecture

...and many more. Be sure to check out the full list and keep checking until December 24th of this year for more great articles from this year's 24 Days in December project.

Freek Van der Herten has made a new post to his site sharing some of the things he thinks that could help to improve PHP conferences in general, not just ones in a particular area of the world.

The past year something has bothered me about the traditional formats most conferences in the PHP ecosystem seem to adhere to. I recently went to DotJS: a JavaScript conference which was organized very differently from the majority of PHP conferences I attended previously.

In this blog post, I'd to highlight what PHP conferences, in general, could consider copying from a conference like DotJS.

Among his suggestions are topics like:

• shortening the talk length
• making lightning talks a "first-class citizen"
• appointing a Master of Ceremony
• avoiding the Q&A portion of the sessions

There's a few other suggestions he offers to around audience seating and how many tracks to have. He spends some time on each point, explaining some of his thoughts and how it relates back to his experience at other conferences outside of the PHP community.

The PHPUgly podcast, hosted by PHP community members Eric Van Johnson, John Congdon and Thomas Rideout, has posted their latest episode - Episode #128: The Set Up.

In this latest show, the hosts discuss several topics including the preloading RFC, Laravel Telescope and the post from Freek Van der Herten about other people's setups.

You can listen to this latest show either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly for listening at your leisure. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter to get updates when the latest shows are released. You can also support them via Patreon to help make the show even better!

In a recent post to the Hackernoon site, Sergii Shanin shares his take on the "PHP is dead" conversations and posts out there with the expected "Viva le PHP!" (long live PHP!) following it.

The fracas over Gutenberg and WordPress is the latest installment in the death of PHP. Take a deep breath everybody. Let’s ignore the trolls and take a look at what Mark Twain, Fidel Castro and PHP have in common?—?and more to the point, why PHP is still a reasonable choice for startups and small businesses.

t looks like ‘PHP is dead’ blog posts started cropping up in 2011 (let me know if you find older ones). If you search around Medium and the coding bootcamps that are popping up like mushrooms, the only common denominator is that everyone hates on PHP or simply ignores it. Apparently, it’s impossible to code in PHP with an oiled beard and ironic t-shirt while drinking overpriced coffee.

He shares two of the most wide-spread myths about PHP - that it's slow and that it can't scale - and dispels them. He then goes through some types projects where PHP "shines" including content driven websites and e-commerce sites. He shares some the "business sense" around choosing PHP, the perspective senior PHP developers bring to teams and projects, and the seeming "nine lives" of PHP.

In this new post to the Pehapkari.cz site they take a look at the PHP user groups all around the world and share some interesting statistics.

In April 2018 I started a side project to list meetups in Europe near Prague. PHP meetups are so much fun and I didn't find any single-page with a map that would list them. In the start, this site had a small table, with 10 meetups a month, very modern black/white Times New Roman design and advanced human-manual updating.

Since then I got feedback from dozens friends and users with this WTFs and ideas - they helped me to add feature now and then, polish a design with emoji and Bootstrap, automate everything and even crawl over 150 urls. I bought friendsofphp.org domain and the project became a standalone single page.

Based on the results shared in the post, there's over 1000 PHP-specific meetups all around the world! It also highlights the most active region (most meetups for the area): the area around Belgium. There's also a list of several cool features of the friendsofphp.orgsite and a more technical description of how the site works and gathers its data.

7PHP.com has returned with a new addition to their series interviewing members of the PHP community. In their latest interview they talk with Giorgio Sironi, a well-known developer in the PHP community.

This is the #40th set of PHP Interviews to help aspiring PHP developers & PHP fans alike to get inspired by listening from those PHP guys who are already highly involved into the PHP Ocean and being ‘there’ taming the waves, surfing better than ever to make themselves an awesome PHP Expert both in their own eyes (for self-accomplishment) and for the PHP Community.

On the other side, this is an opportunity for new PHPers to get to know their “PHP Elders“. I hope you will derive as much fun to read my interviews as I’m having by interviewing those #PHPantastic guys.

In the interview Giorgio answers questions about:

• how he got started with PHP
• what his common stack looks like
• opinions on the good/bad parts of PHP
• the best PHP book he's read
• the best way for people to get started with PHP
• recommended tools and frameworks

...and many others. Be sure to check out the full interview for answers to these and other questions!

In a recent post on their own site, thePHP.cc has shared some of their own perspectives about the recent future of Zend announcement. For those that aren't aware, the company that acquired Zend several years ago - Rogue Wave - announced their decision to discontinue their support of the Zend Framework project.

Last week, Zeev Suraski, Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Enrico Zimuel and Dmitry Stogov, all well-known members of the international PHP community, announced that they will leave Zend, which has been part of Rogue Wave since 2015.

The stated reason is Rogue Wave's strategic decision to focus on the development of Zend Server. If you read between the lines, this implies that Rogue Wave is not going to continue or support the development of the Zend Engine (the core of PHP responsible for compiling and executing code), their IDE Zend Studio, and Zend Framework.

Of course, it is perfectly valid to make money off an Open Source project. This, however, implies at least a moral obligation to give back to said project. Rogue Wave, it seems, will now terminate the symbiotic relationship between PHP and Zend.

The author (Stefan Priebsch) talks about "lip service" not being enough when a company wants to make money from customers but aren't willing to help with the development of the underlying software. He also mentions several other Zend-related products that have a bit more quietly gotten the axe over the years since the acquisition. He wonders about the "downsizing" this could cause in the PHP community given ZF's impact and how, despite this being a large setback for the project, he sees its future as promising given the people involved and the projects around it.

Terry Chay has posted the answer to an interesting question about the PHP language that asks what is something very few know about PHP. The original answer was shared on Quora but he's copied it here for more visibility.

Question: What’s something very few people know about PHP? Answer: It is mind-bogglingly popular for web development. That popularity hasn’t diminished even though conventional wisdom says otherwise…

Over a decade ago, I said about 40% of the top 100 websites use PHP. [...] Overall, almost 80% of the internet is powered by PHP, and that has held steady for years! Newer web languages such as Ruby or NodeJS have only grown at the expense of other languages such as ASP, Java, or Perl.

He also shares some about the role of WordPress in these numbers (a big chunk at 30%) and a guess at how many PHP developers there are in the world right now.

Nikola Posa has a new post to his site sharing what he calls a "community-driven PHP 8 wishlist" as gathered from replies to a tweet he posted back in July 2018.

It's been over two months since I started a research on Twitter about the things that developers would like to be added or improved in the next major PHP release. [...] It had a surprisingly long reach, inspiring developers, prominent experts, community representatives to express their opinion through more than a hundred responses.

It would be a waste to leave such a valuable data in the form of a raw and fuzzy Twitter thread, so I finally found some time to turn it into something more useful.

In the post he shares the results in a spreadsheet, with the top three being: arrow functions, multi-threading and method overloading. Other interesting features also made an appearance pretty high on the list including boot-time preloading, scalar objects, native async and built-in request/response objects. Check out the post for the complete list and how it was processed into its final form.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast, hosted by PHP community member Cal Evans, has posted their latest episode. In this new show Cal interviews the "dynamic duo" of Leanna Pelham and Ryan Weaver of KnpUniversity.

They talk about KnpUniverity, the training it offers and some of the recent happenings with the Symfony framework. They also talk about the process they follow to produce the training. There's also some mention of the PHP Detroit conference and Detroit itself.

You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by download the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter to get updates when new shows are released.