On the SitePoint PHP blog Deji Akala has written up a post talking about the PHP-FIG - some if its history and its current role in the community.

The Polish writer, Henryk Sienkiewicz, was awarded the 1905 Nobel prize for Literature for his epic novel Quo Vadis, which is a Latin phrase meaning “Where are you going?”. In the face of any dilemma, a brief pause and redefinition of one’s goals may be therapeutic.

The PHP Framework Interoperability Group (PHP-FIG) has come of age. With the acceptance of more PHP Standards Recommendations (PSRs), PHP has attracted further positive attention and admiration of the programming community. PSRs governing coding standards, coding style guides, autoloading, logging, caching and HTTP messages have been accepted.

[...] However, the future isn’t as bright as painted, as a recent ruckus within the organization has thrown its continuing existence under doubt.

The post starts out with some of the origins of the group and how its organized and communicates (with a large part of it being the main mailing list). There's some mention of the successes that the group has had (like PSR-0/PSR-4 that allowed for easier creation of the Composer package manager) as well as some disputes that have risen recently about the goals of the group. the post wraps up with a look at other open source communities, the fact that people don't always "see eye-to-eye" and some of the author's own thoughts about the state of PHP-FIG and its future.

One note here: be sure to read the comments on the post - they help clear up a few misunderstandings in the article's contents and give a wider context to the group and its current state.

On the AppDynamics blog there's a post from Omed Habib where he looks at the current state of security in the PHP language and makes predictions about the future of it in PHP and where the language might be heading.

In some ways security is an infinite game of chess on a board the size of the world. For every move you make, the hackers have a countermove ready. They are highly motivated to take what you have, so the game never ends; it just switches players once in awhile. In this final blog in the series, we are going to review the game board, with a look at the most recent changes to security in PHP 7 and earlier supported versions. Then, we’ll try to look a few moves ahead with predictions for the future of PHP security.

In the article he talks about PHP's popularity and how it has somewhat worked against it and its reputation when it comes to secure development. He covers PHP 7 and some of the security-related updates that came with it including:

• whitelisting classes on unserialize
• the cryptographically secure random number generator
• patches for buffer overflows and memory leaks

He ends the post looking at a possible future of the language based on comments made in this other article., suggesting that one possible place for the language to head is into the IoT (Internet of Things) space and interacting with the devices on the other end.

Kevin Schroeder has a new post to his blog today asking "Why PHP?" - not so much a "why you should chose PHP for your development", more of a why PHP is the way it is.

Today on twitter there was a conversation going on about the responsiveness of the core PHP developers to PHP users. [...] This post isn't necessarily to correct perceived errors, to stand behind correct statements, or to state what I believe the problem is. Rather, it is to add something to the conversation that I don't think I've seen much of. The Twitter conversation was, for me, more of a contemplation kickoff and so the purpose of this post is to propose some thoughts for consideration. I don't have sufficient karma to propose changes directly, but I have bet my career on PHP and I want to see it beat the crap out of every language out there.

He points out that most of the opinions out there seem to be of the "what" PHP is rather than the "why" PHP is. He notes that the discussions about the core development (and developers) that's been happening recently is more of a symptom of a larger problem - an unclear definition as to what PHP is and what problem it's there to solve.

Kamran Usman has posted some of his opinions about Zend - more specifically how he thinks they're headed in the wrong direction, moving away from the spirit of the PHP language.

Zend, the so called PHP Company is heading towards an unfriendly, commercial direction which I don't like. I mean, PHP was supposed to be an open source project, I see more focus from Zend on marketing and selling their commercial development tools, certifications and training kits, and less towards creating a free ecosystem that helps in making PHP a more accessible platform for everyone.

As a specific example, me mentions the recent Zend Server release and how they even contradict themselves in their own documentation. He mentions Zend Studio (Eclipse and bloated) and the Zend Framework (sloppy docs and slow) as further examples of things that Zend has either messed up or has not spent enough time on to make a quality product.

Chris Hartjes has blogged about the new CakePHP release that's on the horizon - version 1.2:

I'm certainly not the only person who has been blogging about this, but I thought I'd mention that a feature freeze is coming up for the next CakePHP 1.2 release, codenamed 'DV'. My very modest contribution this time around is a patch to fix a problem with running 'cake bake' on Windows, where it was mangling the app path that a user would enter. Ticket 4495 if anyone is interested.

He makes a few recommendations about how to get involved in the project, but also mentions some of the "trouble in paradise" that's been happening on the mailing list (not friendly for beginners?) and about the direction of the project.

Greg Beaver has announced an "official referendum on the future of PEAR" that he has set in motion to get PEAR developers voting on proposals for where PEAR should be going.

As of February 22, 2007, I have called an official referendum on the future of PEAR. There is a news item on the front page of pear.php.net with the same instructions in this message. This election is only open to PEAR developers who have contributed to the development of a PEAR package at any time in history, but you must have the ability to log in at pear.php.net, and must have "pear.dev" karma.

There's three options - "don't change anything", Greg's constitution, or Anant Narayanan's constitution. The results will pick the path that PEAR will follow and the future of the project. If you have access and the pear.dev karma, head over here and cast your vote today.

Greg Beaver has announced an "official referendum on the future of PEAR" that he has set in motion to get PEAR developers voting on proposals for where PEAR should be going.

As of February 22, 2007, I have called an official referendum on the future of PEAR. There is a news item on the front page of pear.php.net with the same instructions in this message. This election is only open to PEAR developers who have contributed to the development of a PEAR package at any time in history, but you must have the ability to log in at pear.php.net, and must have "pear.dev" karma.

There's three options - "don't change anything", Greg's constitution, or Anant Narayanan's constitution. The results will pick the path that PEAR will follow and the future of the project. If you have access and the pear.dev karma, head over here and cast your vote today.

As all good sites must do, the ThinkingPHP blog is moving onward and upward in its focus, and according to this new post, that only means good things for PHPers.

You might have noticed that I changed the title of this blog to "ThinkingPHP and beyond" a couple days ago. I did that because currently I'm thinking a lot about where go with it. I definetly want to stay focused on PHP in general, but I feel like I (and a lot of other php developers) actually work with a lot more technologies then "just" php. So I'd like to talk about that as well.

Some of the other topics Felix is considering talking about include PHP coding practices, web standards/usability/accessibility, web services, and agile development topics. Keep an eye out here for more to come from this great blog - we'll always post the latest.

As all good sites must do, the ThinkingPHP blog is moving onward and upward in its focus, and according to this new post, that only means good things for PHPers.

You might have noticed that I changed the title of this blog to "ThinkingPHP and beyond" a couple days ago. I did that because currently I'm thinking a lot about where go with it. I definetly want to stay focused on PHP in general, but I feel like I (and a lot of other php developers) actually work with a lot more technologies then "just" php. So I'd like to talk about that as well.

Some of the other topics Felix is considering talking about include PHP coding practices, web standards/usability/accessibility, web services, and agile development topics. Keep an eye out here for more to come from this great blog - we'll always post the latest.