Leonid Mamchenkov has put together a post for those out there trying to get started with workflows in PHP and offers some tips from his own experience.

For a large project at work, we need to integrate or develop a workflow engine. I worked a little bit with workflow engines in the past, but the subject is way to big and complex for me to claim any expertise in it.

So, I am looking at what’s available these days and what are our options. This post is a collection of initial links and thoughts, and it’s goal is mostly to document my research process and findings, and not to provide any answers or solutions yet.

He starts off by defining the requirements of the system he's looking for, both on the technology side and the functional side. He outlines his expected flow and then links to some other resources he found to help define common terminology and some of the standards he found. He found the BPMN v2.0 and tracked down several PHP packages that implement that workflow structure (all linked as well).

The Full Stack Radio podcast has posted their latest episode, Episode #37, featuring an interview with Chris Hartjes, most well known for his promotion and teaching about writing tests (unit, functional, integration, etc) for your applications.

n this episode, Adam talks to the Grumpy Programmer himself about getting started with testing PHP applications.

Topics include: recommended testing tools, PHPUnit vs. phpspec, Mockery vs. Prophecy, the benefits of defensive programming and how to convince your manager to let you write tests.

They also mention Chris' new book "Minimum Viable Tests" and the Patchwork monkey patching library. You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 of the episode directly. Be sure to subscribe to their feed or follow them on Twitter for more information as new episodes are released.

On the NetTuts.com site there's a tutorial posted helping you get started with Laravel, one of the more recently popular PHP frameworks.

Almost all CMS systems use it, including Joomla, Drupal and WordPress, and of course many frameworks like CakePHP use it as well. I arrived at Laravel in early 2014 and I was instantly hooked. It not only uses OOP, it requires it! I have to admit, this was a challenge, but I learned so much thanks to it, and it has made the code I write for other systems a lot better too!

In this article I’ll show you how to get started with Laravel by installing everything that’s needed to run the system, showing you how to use Laravel Homestead - a great virtual machine - and finally, how to install Laravel itself.

The tutorial starts with an introduction of what the framework is and briefly mentions some of its main advantages: standardization, elegance and speed. It then gets into the steps for installing Laravel and setting up a basic application:

• Install Composer
• Install Git
• Install VirtualBox and Vagrant
• Download the Box (Homestead)
• Install the Homestead CLI
• Configure Homestead
• Launching the Vagrant Box

Don't worry, each of these steps comes with all the commands and config file changes you'll need to make. With the environment up and running they finish the article off with a Composer require command to install a Laravel application and how to test that it's up and running.

Now that PHP 7 has been released, it's time to catch up with what this new major version has to offer. In this tutorial from SitePoint you can learn about what the latest features and changes are in this release (including what happened to PHP 6).

PHP 7, the next version of the world’s most popular programming language, has been released. We’d love to shoot fireworks and get drunk with our newfound power (seriously, the language is in the true big leagues now, functionality and performance-wise) but we’re sure the rest of the internet will do this for us. Instead, we’ll focus on compiling a (perpetually up to date) list of resources to get started with version 7 – posts describing what’s new, books helping you kick things off, and more.

The post starts by answering the "what happened to PHP 6?" question, listing a few resources with some more information on the topic. Following this it gets into the "what's new" of PHP 7 including:

• Links to guides to the features themselves
• Tools to help you get a PHP 7 environment set up
• Other PHP 7-related tools

There's also some other miscellaneous things mentioned including the gophp7-ext project trying to get as many extensions PHP 7 compatible and some sources for more "live" help for your questions.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted showing you the right way to start with PHP using Vagrant. Vagrant allows for the easy creation and management of local virtual machines that work as self-contained environments and make for easy reuse.

I often get asked to recommend beginner resources for people new to PHP. And, it’s true, we don’t have many truly newbie friendly ones. I’d like to change that by first talking about the basics of environment configuration. In this post, you’ll learn about the very first thing you should do before starting to work with PHP (or any other language, for that matter). We’ll be re-introducing Vagrant powered development.

He starts off by getting everyone on the same level with an introduction to what Vagrant is, how its set up and some of the advantages is brings to the table. He moves to the next piece of software needed, VirtualBox, that actually hosts the virtual machines. With that installed you'll then need Vagrant. With those both set up, he talks more about what makes this a perfect setup for PHP development and information about their preferred VM, the Homestead Improved image. He ends the post with some links to other resources and SitePoint's own posts with more information on this powerful setup.

The Semaphore Software blog has posted a new tutorial for those wanting to get into the Symfony2 framework and find out what it's all about. In this new tutorial they walk you through some of the basics of the framework and shows you how to get a basic first site up and running.

Symfony 2 has seemingly gained the attention of developers in recent times. Owing to the growing hype surrounding this framework, it is something that you ought to know about. A web application framework formed of reusable PHP components has been termed as Symfony. Symfony 2 is an updated version of this framework, and it enables developers to create websites and web applications with ease and convenience. The individual PHP components that set out to form this framework can be selected as per your design and development requirements. Let’s understand why Symfony is gaining popularity and why it should be used by you.

They start with the download and installation of the current version and where to place the resulting files. They briefly cover each of the main directories in the framework setup including a bit of sample code to illustrate. They then get into the bundling system and how it fits it with the overall ecosystem of your application, diving it up into functional "chunks". They show you how to register, configure and extend a bundle with some of your own functionality. Finally, the tutorial shows how to configure the database connection and run Doctrine to generate the table mappings.

On Medium.com there's a recent post reviewing the book "Getting Started with Laravel 4". In the review Christopher Pitt briefly covers both the good and bad parts of the book.

This book is aimed at newcomers to PHP development, and to Laravel 4 in particular. It doesn’t disappoint. It starts slow, talking about the need for, and role filled by frameworks. It explains what Composer does, and why it’s useful for frameworks like Laravel. It’s not the typical “Laravel needs Composer, here’s the code you use” stuff. There are 40 pages of what is essentially a very gentle introduction, before you even start writing code.

He talks about the sample application the book walks you through creating and some other topics around it including unit testing and artisan commands. He mentions the more popular Code Bright book and points out that he believes it (Code Bright) to be a better deal for the money if you're looking for the more comprehensive intro to Laravel.

Michelangelo van Dam has a new post to his site today talking about PHP user groups and some suggestions you can follow if you'd like to start one of your own in your local area.

When going to conferences you always hear "join a local user group, and if there's none in your area you're the person who needs to start one". But then what? Where do you get started? How do you organise a PHP user group? Basically, you're left in the dark and you're missing out of all the great stuff everyone else can enjoy.

He makes a few suggestions as far as sites and resources to use to help you promote your group (including Meetup.com and even LinkedIn). He offers some guidelines as far as what to do for your first meeting and a few other people and groups at your disposal to help promote and group your group.

Jason Grimes has posted a new tutorial to his blog about integrating Zend Framework 2 with Doctrine, the powerful (and popular) ORM tool for PHP. In his example, he shows how to use them to store the album information from Rob's tutorial.

Zend Framework 2 is getting close to release, and among the changes are new ways to handle dependency injection, and new ways to work with third-party code as modules. Rob "Akrabat" Allen has updated his iconic Getting Started with Zend Framework tutorial for ZF2, and it’s a great place to start. After working through that tutorial, the next thing I wanted to do was figure out how to get the Doctrine 2 ORM up and running. This article shows how to set up and use Doctrine 2 in Zend Framework 2, by extending Rob’s Getting Started tutorial to use Doctrine instead of Zend_Db.

Using Rob's example as a starting point, he shows how to install the Doctrine modules, update the "Album" model and controller to use Doctrine instead of Zend_Db and create the entity for the Albums.

The Symfony blog has a new post with links to some books to help you work with the latest version of the framework - Symfony 1.3/1.4.

The symfony 1.3 and 1.4 final releases are just around the corner, and will probably be published next Monday. As you might have noticed, the symfony documentation have also been updated to take into account the changes made in those two new versions.

They mention the books "Getting Started with Symfony 1.3 & 1.4", the "Symfony 1.3 & 1.4 Reference Guide" and "Practical symfony 1.3 & 1.4". You can either read the contents of them online or you can order them directly from Amazon as a published book.