The PHPUgly podcast, hosted by Eric Van Johnson, John Congdon, and Thomas Rideout, has posted their latest episode - Episode #114: 3D Printed Puns.

This month the team discusses Customer Reviews - PHPUgly on Apple Podcasts

Other topics mentioned include the ruling allowing the 3D printing of guns and recent Facebook censorship/ban issues. You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter for updates when new shows are released.

Christoph Rumpel, lead developer on the BotMan chatbot project, has a new tutorial posted to his site showing how to use Facebook Quick Replies with a BotMan instance.

I guess you already used quick replies for text buttons, right? But did you know that you can ask the user for email, phone number, and current location? It is time to give you a refresh of Facebook Messenger quick replies and how they work in the BotMan chatbot framework.

The post includes a video of the process of integrating these quick replies but also steps through all of the code required. Adding the replies is as easy as using the Button functionality included with the package and adding listeners. The tutorial also shows how to use them in conversations (rather than just one-off calls). It also provides a more "real world" example of asking the user for location, phone number and email with quick replies.

Christoph Rumpel has continued his series covering the creation of a chatbot using the Botman package in a new post to his site. The latest post, part three in the series, builds on the base created in parts one and two and integrates the bot with his project website.

In part one and two we created a Facebook Messenger chatbot that let your users subscribe to your newsletter. We stored that information in the database and sent out our first newsletter. In the last third part, we integrate this bot to a website and write our first tests.

He then walks you through the process of using the Facebook Customer Chat Plugin to integrate it into the site (using the Facebook JavaScript SDK). He includes instructions on whitelisting your domain and including the plugin into the site's source using a few custom configuration options. With the integration complete he then takes a step back and shows the creation of several tests evaluating the fallback handling and subscription conversation responses.

On his site has posted parts one and two of a series showing how to build a chatbot that can help provide more direct interaction with your users via a "newsletter" feature.

Since the beginning of the year, I am working on a new project of mine. It's a book called Build Chatbots with PHP. Follow the link to find out what it is about and who it is for.

More interesting to us is the newsletter, to which you can subscribe on the book's website. About once or twice a month I will send out an email with news on the development of the book.

He starts part one by outlining the general plan and functionality for the bot and its integration with Facebook. The tutorial then walks through the installation and configuration of the BotMan Studio project. It also shows the setup of the application on the Facebook service and how to connect it to the BotMan application. He walks through the setup of a few commands to welcome the user and start the conversation. Part two continues the process showing how to store the user and subscription information and how to send the newsletter notifications. He also makes some suggestions of extra functionality you might want to add like a typing indicator, a "fallback" for unknown commands.

The HHVM project (an alternative PHP runtime from Facebook) has made a major announcement on their blog - beginning with version 3.24 they'll no longer be trying to keep parity with the PHP language now that it has moved into PHP 7.

The HHVM team is happy about the direction PHP has taken with PHP7, and we’re proud of the role we’ve played in pushing the language and runtime to where they are today. Since the PHP community is finally saying goodbye to PHP5, we’ve decided to do so as well.

Our next LTS release, 3.24, will be cut about four months from now and will receive support for one year thereafter. It will also be the last HHVM release that commits to PHP5 support. This aligns with PHP’s own timeline of sunsetting PHP5 at the end of 2018.

[...] PHP7 is charting a new course away from PHP5, and we want to do the same, via a renewed focus on Hack. Consequently, HHVM will not aim to target PHP7. The HHVM team believes that we have a clear path toward making Hack a fantastic language for web development, untethered from its PHP origins. We’d do ourselves and our users a disservice by positioning HHVM as an uncommon, less well-documented, less compatible PHP7 runtime.

The post then lists out some of their goals for the HHVM/Hack projects moving forward including reinvesting in open source and staying focused on their needs for the platform and language. It then talks about some of the upcoming changes you can expect around support of current versions of popular PHP tools and work on tools created specifically for Hack.

Christoph Rumpel has written up a tutorial on his site showing you how to use Larave and the Botman package to create a simple chatbot for use on Facebook.

With BotMan it is really easy to setup a Facebook chatbot. This week the new 2.0 version was released. We will checkout how to setup a Facebook Messenger chatbot in this new version with BotMan Studio.

He starts with a list of requirements to be sure you have installed before proceeding. He then helps you get the Botman software installed and the command to bootstrap a Facebook bot instance. He includes instructions on how to test the bot and how to configure it to work with a Facebook application (requiring relevant token/secret information). From there he shows you how to set up the Facebook application and connect the bot to it via a webhook. The ngrok tool makes this easier as it exposes your local Laravel application on an external URL for testing. Finally, he shows how to test the integration by sending a few sample messages to the bot and getting responses.

Stefan Koopmanschap has a new post to his site showing the Sculpin users out there how to customize the system for a highlight image and Facebook integration.

Over the past months I've been slowly customizing my Sculpin installation for this blog to fit my own liking a bit more. I've added a bit more styling including a beautiful background image and a transparent white background for the content column. Today I wanted to add a bit more. Two things specifically: I wanted to control a bit more about how my blogposts are displayed when they are shared on Facebook [and] I wanted to have an optional image at the top of blogposts to make them look a bit better.

It turns out this was actually quite easy, so here's a short description of what I did to make it work.

He splits the article into these two parts, showing how to add in custom markup and add custom frontmatter to modify the Facebook posts. He then shows how to add a block to the main templates for the highlight image and a small section to credit the photo back to the original.

On the Hackernoon site today Sebastian De Deyne has written up a tutorial showing you how to use Watchman to automatically run PHPUnit tests for your application when things change. Watchman is a tool from Facebook that watches files and directories for updates and execute actions based on the changes.

Watchman watches files and triggers actions when they change. The reasoning behing choosing Watchman: it’s easy to install, simple to configure, and reliable.

The watchman-make command - which ships with Watchman - is a specialised interface for Watchman to invoke build tools in response to file changes - exactly what we need!

In the setup he creates, Watchman is used to look for changes on files in either the project's src/ or tests/ directories and execute a bash script (code provided) that runs the tests and outputs the results. He walks through each line of the script and Watchman command, explaining how it works and what the option points to. You can see the results here of an edit to a test and the output in a Terminal window once it's saved.

Christoph Rumpel has a tutorial posted on his site showing how to create a Telegram group bot using a bit of PHP and the BotMan library.

Working with Facebook Messengers bots is great, but there is one thing still missing: group bots! This is why we will built a little Telegram bot today and use it inside my FantasticBurger group.

First thing to keep in mind here is that a group chatbot can be very different from a 1:1 conversation chatbot. In groups chatbots are often not a direct conversation partner but more a quiet assistant.

He briefly talks about why he created the bot and how to go and set up your own Telegraph bot with a simple first command. He then walks through the set up of the BotMan library and connecting it back to the Telegraph service (via an API call) and a simple handler that returns a "Hi there" message when the bot hears the string "Hello".

The Scotch.io site has posted a tutorial for the Laravel users out there showing you how to use the Socalite package in your application to make authentication handling with external services simpler.

Laravel introduced a built in Authentication module in version 5.2. To set this up, you just have to run php artisan make:auth and everything is generated for you, from the views to the controllers and the routes.

[...] And that is a great thing. However, this command will only make you a traditional login. In most sites nowadays when signing up, users have the option of signing up with a social provider such as Facebook. In this tutorial, I will teach you how to add multiple social providers to a Laravel app using Socialite package. For this tutorial we will add Facebook, Github and Twitter signups.

They start off with a new Laravel application (but, of course, you can use your current one), setting up a new database and creating a custom "users" table that includes "provider" information. The User model is then updated to allow the population of this data and the "make:auth" command is run. The Socialite package is then included and the application is configured to include its service provider. The tutorial then steps you through creating Github, Twitter and Facebook applications, getting the keys needed to drop into your app's configuration. Finally they update the login/registration pages with the social login buttons and how they'll now "magically" work.