On the CodeWall.co.uk blog Dan Englishby has shared his list of what he considers the "must have" extensions for the Visual Studio Code editor for PHP developers to help make them more productive and make their jobs simpler.

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is completely competent with the PHP language. It’s something that shocked me personally when it was released as I really didn’t expect it to come prepared for PHP developers. But yep, it is a valid development environment for PHP, and of course, there are plenty of extensions to be used with it.

In this article, I will go through the best available extensions that can be installed with your version of VSCode. With this list of essential extensions you can configure your Visual Studio Code IDE into a wizardry-code-environment.

His list includes tools for a wide range of tooling and helpful functions including:

• PHP Intellisense
• DocBlocker
• PHP Getter & Setter
• Custom Snippet Pack
• PHP Files Extension

Each item in the list has a link to the extension in the VSCode marketplace and a brief description of what it can do.

The php[architect] magazine has released their latest edition, their issue for October 2015 - "Integrating Extensions":

This issue shows you how to use Solr search directly from PHP and put it to good use, explains how PHAR files work to bundle PHP applications in a single file, and provides a case study in using libfann from PHP to create and train a neural network.

Also, you can read up on how to prepare for PHP 7, learn PHP type casting peculiarities, migrate from WordPress to Sculpin, a chat with Stefan Koopmanschap, and more.

This month's issue also includes a free article so you can get a sampling of the magazine: Casting Tales in PHP. You can pick up just this issue or grab a year long digital/print/combo subscription directly from the php[architect] website.

If you're a MediaWiki user, the PHP::Impact blog has a list of twenty extensions you don't want to miss out on:

MediaWiki is a great PHP-based Wiki application that is used to power many sites, including Wikipedia itself. One of MediaWiki strengths is how easy it is to extend with its plug-in architecture. The following is a list of 20 extensions that should make your life easier and save you a fair bit of time.

Plugins included in the list are things like:

• SimpleFeed
• Tasks
• CheckUser
• SyntaxHighlight GeSHi

Check out the full list for more great plugins.

Damien Seguy has continued his series looking at PHP configurations around the web and is sharing the results in the form of two new reports over on Nexen.net.

I just published the second part of the serie about PHP configurations. This part focuses on three aspects of PHP: PHP extensions, PHP streams, and disabled functions.

You can find the statistics themselves here and the latest configuration statistics here. It's interesting to see the drop-off when it comes to the various modules that are installed ("php, ftp and http are the most common. Besides them, tough luck.") and to see the somewhat more gradual curve of which functions are disabled - with system() topping out the list (with good reason).

Damien Seguy has continued his series looking at PHP configurations around the web and is sharing the results in the form of two new reports over on Nexen.net.

I just published the second part of the serie about PHP configurations. This part focuses on three aspects of PHP: PHP extensions, PHP streams, and disabled functions.

You can find the statistics themselves here and the latest configuration statistics here. It's interesting to see the drop-off when it comes to the various modules that are installed ("php, ftp and http are the most common. Besides them, tough luck.") and to see the somewhat more gradual curve of which functions are disabled - with system() topping out the list (with good reason).

Ilia Alshanetsky notes in this new post on his blog today that the latest release candidate of the PHP 5.x series has been released - PHP 5.2.0 RC1.

Given that it took a few months to reach this point and addition of new features was allowed the changelog already looks extremely impressive.

Some of the key changes include things like 3 new extensions (filter, json and zip), the date extension had the rest of its functionality enabled, much work was done in terms of getting PHP 5.2 to run faster and more efficiently (in terms on memory usage). There have also been nearly 80 bug fixes made to existing functionality, which hopefully translates to a more stable release.

This latest edition can be downloaded from:

• BZipped archive
• GZipped archive

And, as ususal, testing and feedback is definitely requested to help work out as many kinks as possible.

Ilia Alshanetsky notes in this new post on his blog today that the latest release candidate of the PHP 5.x series has been released - PHP 5.2.0 RC1.

Given that it took a few months to reach this point and addition of new features was allowed the changelog already looks extremely impressive.

Some of the key changes include things like 3 new extensions (filter, json and zip), the date extension had the rest of its functionality enabled, much work was done in terms of getting PHP 5.2 to run faster and more efficiently (in terms on memory usage). There have also been nearly 80 bug fixes made to existing functionality, which hopefully translates to a more stable release.

This latest edition can be downloaded from:

• BZipped archive
• GZipped archive

And, as ususal, testing and feedback is definitely requested to help work out as many kinks as possible.

Jeremy Johnstone has a quick post with details on his talk he's been invited to give at this year's O'Reilly Open Source COnvention.

His topic will be "Writing Your Own PHP Extensions: How & Why from A-Z" and will be presented as a beginner's guide to creating these expansions on the PHP core. It will explain the "whys" and where to get started as well as some resources and other materials on where to go from there. Some basic code will be provided to get your feet wet and provide a base to work from.

For more information on the talks being given for this year's conference, check out the sessions list and to narrow it down to just the PHP related talks, check out this. Other speakers covering PHP-related topics include Chris Shiflett, George Schlossnagle, Andrei Zmievski, and Rasmus Lerdorf.

Jeremy Johnstone has a quick post with details on his talk he's been invited to give at this year's O'Reilly Open Source COnvention.

His topic will be "Writing Your Own PHP Extensions: How & Why from A-Z" and will be presented as a beginner's guide to creating these expansions on the PHP core. It will explain the "whys" and where to get started as well as some resources and other materials on where to go from there. Some basic code will be provided to get your feet wet and provide a base to work from.

For more information on the talks being given for this year's conference, check out the sessions list and to narrow it down to just the PHP related talks, check out this. Other speakers covering PHP-related topics include Chris Shiflett, George Schlossnagle, Andrei Zmievski, and Rasmus Lerdorf.