Christopher Vundi has continued his series covering the integration of Laravel and the Stream service in this new tutorial. In the first post he showed how to add "follow" handling to the application, complete with a real-time stream event when it happens. In this new post he uses some of the same handling to enhance this to a larger "social network" type application.

In the previous post, we saw how to add the follow functionality to a Laravel app. We also looked at how to configure our app to use Stream. This part will focus on: configuring our models in order to make it possible to track activities, the different types of feeds that Stream provides, getting feeds from Stream [and] rendering the different types of feeds in a view.

He starts in with the "activity field" functionality, a base level object that stores each event that happens in the system and is then relayed to Stream. Then, using the included "feed manager" in the Stream package, he shows how to use built-in feeds and add in a custom feed for follow and unfollow events. The tutorial then walks through the output process of the events, handling of the updates from Stream and routing those back out to the waiting news feed on the frontend.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted from Christopher Pitt showing you how to set up real-time notifications and Follows with Stream in a Laravel application. Stream is a service that helps to take some of the burden out of creating "scalable newsfeeds and activity streams" with just a bit of extra code.

With Laravel, it’s pretty easy to create newsfeed sites, blogs, or even forums where people post content, comment, or even mark some of these posts as favorite. To spice things up, we can make the app more lively by adding notifications for actions performed by other users. In this tutorial, we’ll be relying on a service called Stream to add this functionality to our app.

Using this repository as a starting point how shows how to create a simple blog with some real-time features along with the usual CRUD operations on the blog posts themselves. He starts off by walking through the setup of the project in a Homestead Improved environment. Then it's on to the functionality:

• setting up the user "follow" model and migration
• creating the routes for the follow functionality
• building out the controller and view templates

With that basic structure in place he then brings in the Stream functionality via the get-stream/stream-laravel package. He shows how to set up an application on the Stream site, configure the connection and add in the functionality to send notifications when posts are created.

The TutsPlus.com site has posted the latest tutorial in their "Building with the Twitter API" series showing how to, in a Yii2 application, automatically add friends to a Twitter account via the Twitter API. You've probably seen this in several services that offer suggestions of followers to add to your list.

Today I'll guide you through using the Yii2 Framework for PHP to access the Twitter API and automate adding friends to people's Twitter accounts. (If you'd like to learn more about Yii2, check out our parallel series Programming With Yii2.)

And, I've created a website, Twixxr.com, which will let you demonstrate the feature by adding prominent women on Twitter for your account to follow.

The tutorial starts with links to some of the other Twitter tutorials that have been posted in the past and how things have evolved to make it easier in a Yii2 application. He starts by helping you get the Twitter OAuth PHP Library installed and lists some of the goals of the end result. The code is included to authorize the user and handle the callback once they've approved the app in the normal OAuth flow. It then shows how to connect via the API using that user's information, load profiles for the suggested users and link them as a friend. The tutorial finishes with a look at performance and a bit of code used to handle the backend processing of the request instead of performing it in real time.

On the New Relic blog today there's a new list posted of the 25 PHP developers they suggest you follow, both on Twitter and via their code contributions.

Building PHP frameworks is hard, but following these PHP source and framework committers on Twitter is easy. You’ll learn lots of interesting bits about what’s happening in their respective communities, and if you want to see where the PHP and PHP framework communities are going next, just watch your feed for these folks.

Included in their list are PHP notables like:

• Sebastian Bergmann
• Evan Coury
• Cal Evans
• Rasmus Lerdorf
• Fabien Potencier
• Igor Wiedler

Check out the full post for the rest of the list!

<p. Brandon Savage has posted a list of blogs he suggests following for those interested in the PHP community including (disclaimer) PHPDeveloper.org itself.

A lot of people, especially when starting out in PHP, ask me “what blogs should I read?” There are a lot of great PHP blogs (you can see a nearly complete list of them at Planet PHP) but there are a few that I read on a regular basis and I feel are important.

His list includes PHP community members like Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Chris Hartjes, Anthony Ferrara and the PHPMaster.com site from SitePoint. Check out the full list for more great blogs.

Cal Evans has posted a list of all of the Twitter-ers (?) out there in the PHP community and links to their pages.

The PHP community has an active twitter presence. If you use twitter, come and join us. Here I've listed all of the community memeber's accounts that I have and that have given me permission to.

Scroll on down the list, see who you haven't already added and check out their Twitter page - then following is just a click away!

Just a quick note to all of you Twitter-ers out there - we've added our own account you can follow if you'd like to get the latest PHPDeveloper.org news straight to your client (or cellphone):

Just head over to the Twitter site and follow phpdeveloper to get the latest updates. It uses the Twitter Feed website to pull our feed in and push it out, so you'll get the latest updates as they come out.

The Zend Developer Zone has launched a new feature for their PHP Abstract podcasts to help make giving feedback on the episodes even simpler (especially on mobile devices) - a TwitterBridge.

We know many people listen to PHP Abstract on their cell phones or mobile music device. Many of you aren't near a computer when you listen. Even so, we want to hear from you about the episodes. So we’ve installed our handy new TwitterBridge. Now, all you need to leave a comment about an episode of PHP Abstract is a twitter account.

You'll need a Twitter account (obviously) and then set it up to follow phpa, then any comments that are sent starting with "@phpa" will be grabbed and pushed into the comment system automatically.

The Zend Developer Zone has launched a new feature for their PHP Abstract podcasts to help make giving feedback on the episodes even simpler (especially on mobile devices) - a TwitterBridge.

We know many people listen to PHP Abstract on their cell phones or mobile music device. Many of you aren't near a computer when you listen. Even so, we want to hear from you about the episodes. So we’ve installed our handy new TwitterBridge. Now, all you need to leave a comment about an episode of PHP Abstract is a twitter account.

You'll need a Twitter account (obviously) and then set it up to follow phpa, then any comments that are sent starting with "@phpa" will be grabbed and pushed into the comment system automatically.