In a recent post to his site Leonid Mamchenkov has shared a few links to packages that provide country and currency lists and a new one he's discovered that does an even better job.

Many software projects deal with the lists of countries and currencies. Some of the most common tasks include country an currency dropdowns, country flags next to the IP, or pre-filling country codes in phone numbers.

All of that information is of course standardized and you often just need a library or two to provide and use it. And there are many of those. [...] Today, however, I came across a better option – antonioribeiro/countries, which is a collection of country and currency information for Laravel PHP framework. Laravel is not required though.

The package, easily installable via Composer, provides information for over 250 countries and 250 different currencies. There's also flags, maps, states, cities and more. Check out the repository for the full list of data it offers.

In this new post to the Pehapkari.cz site they take a look at the PHP user groups all around the world and share some interesting statistics.

In April 2018 I started a side project to list meetups in Europe near Prague. PHP meetups are so much fun and I didn't find any single-page with a map that would list them. In the start, this site had a small table, with 10 meetups a month, very modern black/white Times New Roman design and advanced human-manual updating.

Since then I got feedback from dozens friends and users with this WTFs and ideas - they helped me to add feature now and then, polish a design with emoji and Bootstrap, automate everything and even crawl over 150 urls. I bought friendsofphp.org domain and the project became a standalone single page.

Based on the results shared in the post, there's over 1000 PHP-specific meetups all around the world! It also highlights the most active region (most meetups for the area): the area around Belgium. There's also a list of several cool features of the friendsofphp.orgsite and a more technical description of how the site works and gathers its data.

On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a post from editor Bruno Skvorc wondering if PHP and IoT have a future together. The "Internet of Things" (IoT) is a technology sector that has been growing by leaps and bounds over the past few years as more and more devices become internet-aware and connected.

It’s IoT Week at SitePoint! [...] A whole week of mostly IoT resources on every channel and, yes, that includes PHP. What? “PHP and IoT!? Surely you’re mistaken!”, you must be thinking. No, dear reader. PHP and IoT go well together – better than one might expect.

In this post, we’ll list some getting started resources. Throughout the remainder of the week, we’ll have some amazing hands on posts for you – everything from creating a drinks machine with PHP, to a real life alarm when a door in Minecraft opens (yes, really!) – and that’s just on our channel. Be sure to check out the others, too!

The remainder of the post is then broken down into two sections: hardware and software/tutorials. In each there's plenty of links to articles, libraries, pieces of IoT hardware (low level, not consumer) and various PHP libraries that can help you get integrated quickly.

Composer has changed how PHP developers work with external libraries and packages in even just the small amount of time its been around. One of the keys to its use, though, is getting your code listed on the Packagist site for easy requesting. In this new tutorial on PHPMaster.com, they walk you through doing just that.

You’ve created an awesome library, and now you’re ready to open source it and share it with the world. Hopefully someone else can benefit from your work, and maybe you’ll even receive a bug report or patch to make the library even better. But none of that can happen unless people can find it… and the modern way is increasingly becoming through Composer and Packagist. In this article I’ll show you what information is needed in your composer.json file and how to list your library on Packagist so others can easily find it.

He talks some about the "composer.json" file for your project and talks some about the content that has to be there for Packagist to be able to pick it up correctly. He then shows you how to go over to the Packagist website, log in and add a package to their repository. It then shows you where on Github you'll need to go to set up a Service Hook to talk back to Packagist when a new version is deployed.

Brandon Savage has a new post today announcing the official release of the Washington, D.C. PHP user group's website - a Drupal site with the latest information about the usergroup's goings-on.

Today, the DC PHP Developer's Group announced a new community website, at http://www.dcphp.net/. The website was the result of a few months' discussions between key leaders in the group, including Keith Casey [also of Blue Parabola], Joe LeBlanc, Barry Austin and myself.

If you're looking for a PHP user group in your area, there's a few resources to check out - the (slightly outdated) listing on the PHPUserGroups.org website, the calendar on PHP.net or just a reliable search on Google to find the one closest to you.

You can find more about the DCPHP.net site launch in this post on Keith Casey's blog.

The PHPedia blog has posted their top five list if scripts to replace the default listing Apache does for a directory without an index file.

Here's their list:

• phpFe - PHP file explorer
• fileNice
• Autoindex
• QuiXplorer
• GaMerZ File Explorer

Check out the PHPedia post for example screenshots of each.

Vidyut Luther has started up a new service that aims to help answer the question "what sites out there are running on PHP?" - PHP Powered:

Welcome to PHP Powered. The point of the site is simple. We want to create a comprehensive list of sites that use PHP. The list of sites here is contributed and updated by you, the users/visitors. To add a site, you must have a valid account with the site. Create an account, respond to the verification email, and proceed to add your site.

The site allows developers/users/anyone really to signup and add the sites they know are running on PHP to share with the world. You can also check out the listing page that lets you search and sort by the type of site, the PHP version that it's running, and the operating system it runs on.

Vidyut Luther has started up a new service that aims to help answer the question "what sites out there are running on PHP?" - PHP Powered:

Welcome to PHP Powered. The point of the site is simple. We want to create a comprehensive list of sites that use PHP. The list of sites here is contributed and updated by you, the users/visitors. To add a site, you must have a valid account with the site. Create an account, respond to the verification email, and proceed to add your site.

The site allows developers/users/anyone really to signup and add the sites they know are running on PHP to share with the world. You can also check out the listing page that lets you search and sort by the type of site, the PHP version that it's running, and the operating system it runs on.

In his continuing effort to redesign his blog, Shiflett.org, he's been working on one of the things that really makes a blog useful - the commenting system. Specifically, he wants site visitors to be able to add their own code listings to the comments they post. He gives more detail in this new post.

I've been playing with this tonight. Feel free to follow along as I go. The first thing you want to do is create an ordered list from the code you want to format ($code in these examples).

He gives an example of a listing using his system and explains how it all works. It's a mixture of:

• PHP for parsing the data inside the 'code' tags
• CSS to correctly style the information, whitespace and all
• Some ini settings to set parameters for...
• ...the use of highlight string on the PHP code contents

A little str_replace magic later and you have list items styled as code blocks on your page. Check out his demo for an example.

In his continuing effort to redesign his blog, Shiflett.org, he's been working on one of the things that really makes a blog useful - the commenting system. Specifically, he wants site visitors to be able to add their own code listings to the comments they post. He gives more detail in this new post.

I've been playing with this tonight. Feel free to follow along as I go. The first thing you want to do is create an ordered list from the code you want to format ($code in these examples).

He gives an example of a listing using his system and explains how it all works. It's a mixture of:

• PHP for parsing the data inside the 'code' tags
• CSS to correctly style the information, whitespace and all
• Some ini settings to set parameters for...
• ...the use of highlight string on the PHP code contents

A little str_replace magic later and you have list items styled as code blocks on your page. Check out his demo for an example.