The Arpatech.com blog has a new post sharing their list of top nine things to know about PHP 7 with some brief explanations for each. It's not an in-depth coverage of the features in this latest major release of the language but it does give a nice overview for those not familiar with what really changed.

If you are a web developer or a website owner, and you love to use CMS that are PHP-enabled like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or PHP timetable, PHP 7 which was released on 3 December 2015, is now ready for the production use.

Yes you heard it right! PHP 7 is out to use. We are going to tell all the great things you need to know about PHP 7.

They've included several types of topics in their list, both code and performance related:

• PHPNG, the New Core
• Double the Speed
• New Spaceship (<=>) and Null Coalescing (??) Operators
• Enables Accurate Type Declarations
• Imports from the Same Namespace

Each item on the list comes with a brief summary of what the improvement offers and, in the case of code-related items, a quick snippet showing it in action.

At the Laravel News site mentions, the latest version of the Laravel framework has been released: Laravel 5.4.

Version 5.4 of Laravel is now officially released! This release has many new features, and improvements.

A video is included in the post showing some of these features and improvements as well as a text-based version with a bit more detail. Topics include:

• Laravel Dusk
• Blade components and slots
• Markdown emails
• Route improvements
• Higher order messaging for collections

Each item in the post comes with a brief explanation of the feature and a code snippet showing how it can be used. It also finishes with some of the smaller updates and links to the 4.5 upgrade guide to help you migrate your current application.

On the official PHP.net site they've announced the release of PHP 7.1.0, the latest major release of the PHP 7 series:

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.1.0. This release is the first point release in the 7.x series.

PHP 7.1.0 comes with numerous improvements and new features such as

• Nullable types
• Void return type
• Iterable pseudo-type
• Class constant visibility modifiers
• Square bracket syntax for list() and the ability to specify keys in list()
• Catching multiple exceptions types

There's several more changes in this release as well including security updates, bugfixes and a host of new features. As always, you can download the source packages for this latest release directly from a PHP.net mirror or get the Windows binaries from the PHP for Windows site. You can find the full changelog of the release here and a migration guide here.

The Symfony blog has a post that talks about the state of the Symfony "Demo" application three months after its release. The "Demo" application is a simpler way to get an entire Symfony 2 application up and running, giving you a good foundation for either your own development or quick testing.

The [Symfony Demo application](https://github.com/symfony/symfony-demo) was publicly introduced three months ago. In addition to being a learning resource, it's considered the reference implementation of the [Symfony Best Practices](http://symfony.com/doc/current/best_practices/index.html). During the past weeks, we've been busy adding new features to showcase Symfony functionalities. This article is a quick recap of the most important new features.

They talk about four different improvements to the demo setup and configuration process:

• Full internationalization
• New console commands
• New technical requirements checker
• New JavaScript and Sass/CSS management

They also briefly mention a few other miscellaneous changes at the end of the application around security, debugging helpers and more functional testing.

On the Magenticians site there's a new post that provides an update of sorts, a post-mortem really, about their opinion of the "open source-ness" of the Magento product and project.

Little less than four months ago, we published an opinion-piece regarding Magento 2 and why we thought it wasn’t really holding up to the mindset of being an open source project. In four months, a lot has changed. [...] Magento 2 was (and still is) being marketed as a new platform which not only refreshes the entire code base, but also improves handling of the community its feedback and involvement. [...] Most of the original critique was therefore that, though by definition Magento 2 is an open source project, all the rest which should naturally come with “being open source”, severely lacked. It is one of our best read articles and linked from a dozen of websites; a timely status update is in its place.

They go on to update some of their original comments and note that things "feel more like open source" with changes including direct pushes to GitHub (not mirrored) and better external communication. They point out a few other smaller things including their developer hub, updated developer documentation and more informative blog posts about the project/project.

In this new post to his site Jordi Boggiano talks about the tagging of the 1.0 alpha9 release of Composer and some of the updates that will be coming along with the release.

I tagged Composer's 1.0.0-alpha9 release yesterday and wanted to write down a more detailed update on the highlights of this release. It includes many changes as the last tag was almost one year old. You can also check the full changelog if you want more details.

The updates (so far) include:

• Requiring packages from CLI just got easier
• Installing dependencies on the wrong environment is now possible
• You now get warnings when installing abandoned packages
• Custom composer commands via scripts
• Autoloading tests and related files
• Performance improvements

He also includes a brief note of thanks to all of those that have contributed to the project and for the support from Toran Proxy customers to help pay for the time he spends working on the tool.

The latest version of the popular PHP unit testing tool PHPUnit has officially been released (version 4.0.0) and comes with some nice improvements. In this post to the PHPcc blog Sebastian Bergmann talks about enhancements in one area - code coverage reporting.

One of the highlights of PHPUnit 4.0, which was released last week, is an improvement of the @covers annotation and the addition of the @uses annotation for better code coverage analysis.

He includes a few simple code snippets showing you how the "@covers" annotation has been working and how it can be used in both strict and non-strict modes. He also introduces the "@uses" annotation to define which objects the test is using and how the two interact. He finishes off the post with a mention of the "--strict-coverage" command line flag (or the more general "--strict").

Continuing on from his first Symfony2 is getting easier post, Fabien Potencier has two new posts in the series looking at other aspects of the framework that have improved to make developers' lives easier.

In part 2 he talks about a patch that's been applied to help with errors in the autoloading process and throw an exception if something's' not found.

Part 3 talks about an update to help make the pathing shorter on the Doctrine configuration files and the ability to move it to a centralized mapping file in the app/config.

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.