The Laravel News site has posted a tutorial that offers some advice on how to prioritize fixing bugs and errors in your applications.

One major problem is that prioritizing errors isn’t always clear. Figuring out how much negative impact a bug is really causing is important to answer because not all bugs are worth fixing.

That’s why having a solid workflow in place for prioritizing bugs is so important. In order to confidently allocate your engineering resources on bug fixes and feature building, you need to understand the scope of each application error, and its impact on your customers. Then you can definitively say particular bugs are high enough priority that they should be scheduled into a sprint alongside your work on building new features.

The article is then broken down into a few different sections, each with a few points underneath:

• Get setup with smart error reporting from the start
• Focus your error inbox to keep it actionable
• Prioritize the most relevant errors first
• Prioritize errors by moving them into your debugging workflow

The post is sponsored by Bugsnag so there's some of the content that suggests using their service but the advice is sound for any kind of error handling workflow.

The Knp University site has a new post to their blog sharing how they migrated to Symfony 2.7, the latest release of the popular PHP framework.

Symfony 2.7 - the next LTS release - came out on Saturday, with bells and whistles like 100+ new features/enhancements and a surprise new bridge component to PSR-7. So, we decided to upgrade immediately and report back. Let's go!

They walk through each stage of the process, sharing code and summaries about what changed along the way (including the update to the composer.json):

• You need to upgrade sensio/distribution-bundle
• You Need -with-dependencies
• Upgrading FOSUserBundle
• Fixing Behat 2.5

It's a pretty short list and obviously your milage may vary depending on what version you're updating from, but most recent versions shouldn't have too much trouble.

The PHP.net site has announced both the release of PHP 5.3.29 and a reminder that the PHP 5.3.x series is coming close to its "end of life" date.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.29. This release marks the end of life of the PHP 5.3 series. Future releases of this series are not planned. All PHP 5.3 users are encouraged to upgrade to the current stable version of PHP 5.5 or previous stable version of PHP 5.4, which are supported till at least 2016 and 2015 respectively. PHP 5.3.29 contains about 25 potentially security related fixes backported from PHP 5.4 and 5.5

If you're using any release in the PHP 5.3.x series, it's highly recommended you either update to this latest version or you make the jump up to something in the PHP 5.4 or 5.5 series. You can get this latest release either from the main downloads page or for Windows users the windows.php.net site. The full change log can be found here.

Ilia Alshanetsky has officially announced that the latest release candidate for the PHP 5.2.5 series (RC1) has been posted and is ready to test.

This RC includes a fair number of fixes since our last release and predominantly works on improving the stability of the 5.2 tree as well as including a small number of minor security fixes. I'd like to ask everyone to test this release against your code and setups, we are aiming for a quick release cycle and user feedback is critical for a successful release.

You can download this latest version here.

In an effort to keep track of some of the lesser seen patches to the core of PHP, the Zend Developer Zone has started a weekly summary that talks about the PAT directory:

The PAT directory contains patches (fixes and improvements for the C source code behind PHP) that have been sent to the internal developers' mailing list by members of the wider PHP community. The mailing list is fairly busy - as are the developers - and patches aren't always noticed by someone able to review and perhaps apply them; this can lead to people repeatedly mailing the same patch to the list in the belief that they're being ignored!

The idea behind the posts is to provide a listing of those patches for those looking for them (including the PHP dev team) until they've been evaluated and moved out of the PAT directory purgatory.

In an effort to keep track of some of the lesser seen patches to the core of PHP, the Zend Developer Zone has started a weekly summary that talks about the PAT directory:

The PAT directory contains patches (fixes and improvements for the C source code behind PHP) that have been sent to the internal developers' mailing list by members of the wider PHP community. The mailing list is fairly busy - as are the developers - and patches aren't always noticed by someone able to review and perhaps apply them; this can lead to people repeatedly mailing the same patch to the list in the belief that they're being ignored!

The idea behind the posts is to provide a listing of those patches for those looking for them (including the PHP dev team) until they've been evaluated and moved out of the PAT directory purgatory.

The latest version of PHP in the 4.4.x series has been released today - PHP 4.4.3:

The PHP development team is proud to announce the release of PHP 4.4.3. This release combines small number of bug fixes and resolves a number of security issues.

Some of the updates to this edition include:

• Disallow certain characters in session names.
• Prevent jumps to parent directory via the 2nd parameter of the tempnam() function.
• Fixed cross-site scripting inside the phpinfo() function.
• Upgraded bundled PCRE library to version 6.6

You can download this latest edition here.

The latest version of PHP in the 4.4.x series has been released today - PHP 4.4.3:

The PHP development team is proud to announce the release of PHP 4.4.3. This release combines small number of bug fixes and resolves a number of security issues.

Some of the updates to this edition include:

• Disallow certain characters in session names.
• Prevent jumps to parent directory via the 2nd parameter of the tempnam() function.
• Fixed cross-site scripting inside the phpinfo() function.
• Upgraded bundled PCRE library to version 6.6

You can download this latest edition here.

For all of the readers of Oracle's Alison Holloway mentions just such an update in her latest blog post.

Chris Jones and I have just released an updated version of the Underground PHP and Oracle Manual on OTN. We've numbered it as 1.2.1, and it has some bug fixes, and some extra information on Oracle SQL Developer.

If you have comments or corrections you'd like to submit on this new updated version, you can post a comment here.

For all of the readers of Oracle's Alison Holloway mentions just such an update in her latest blog post.

Chris Jones and I have just released an updated version of the Underground PHP and Oracle Manual on OTN. We've numbered it as 1.2.1, and it has some bug fixes, and some extra information on Oracle SQL Developer.

If you have comments or corrections you'd like to submit on this new updated version, you can post a comment here.