On the php[architect] site they've shared an article from their December 2018 edition by Colin DeCarlo and issues with dates and times that most developers deal with at some point in their careers.

As applications scale and gain adoption, dates and time become much more of a concern than they once were. Bugs crop up, and developers start learning the woes of time zones and daylight saving time. Why did that reminder get sent a day early? How could that comment have been made at 5:30 a.m. if the post didn’t get published until 9:00 a.m.? Indiana has how man time zones?!

Luckily, PHP developers have the tools they need to face these problems head-on and take back control of their apps.

The article covers some of the basics of "time" and some of the concepts that PHP uses to measure it. It then introduces the different time functionality that PHP offers including timestamps and functions like strtotime and date as well as the DateTime handling. They dig into this last one in more detail before talking about timezones and date arithmetic.

php[architect] magazine has posted an announcement about the release of their December 2018 issue - Better Practice - Improve Your Skills.

Practice and more practice are the keys to adopting modern software engineering practices. It doesn’t matter if you’re using WordPress or Drupal to manage website content, trying to learn unit testing, get hired, or looking for better ways to manage date and time data—there’s always an opportunity to learn how to do it better. This issue rounds up articles on each of these topics to help you deepen your problem-solving skills.

Articles in this issue include:

• "Custom Post Types in WordPress" by Andrea Roenning
• "The Flexibility of Drupal 8" by Michael Miles
• "How to Learn PHP Unit Testing With Katas" by David Hayes
• "It’s About Time" by Colin DeCarlo

All of the usual columns have returned as well with thoughts about creating a culture in your development organization, hashing, interview coding challenges and more. Check out the full list of articles and columns for this month's edition on the php[architect] site and pick up a copy of your own! If you want to "try before you buy" you can read this month's free article and get a feel for the content.

php[architect] magazine has released their latest issue for November 2018: Generics and Project Success. In this issue they feature articles like:

• "The Case for Generics in PHP" by Chris Holland
• "Maintaining Laravel Applications" by Jason McCreary
• "Getting Started With Php? Let’s Start the Right Way!" by Junior Grossi
• "How to Knock Down Any Project in Ten Steps" by Pawe? Lewtak

The usual columns are all returning including Joe Ferguson continuing his series on creating packages, Eric Mann covering five security risks to look for in a code review, and James Titcumb with some resources you can use to continue "leveling up" in your development career.

If you want to "try before you buy", they're also offering a free article, "The Case for Generics in PHP" by Chris Holland. You can pick up a copy of your own directly from the php[architect] site or subscribe to their print or PDF versions!

If you're a reader of php[architect] magazine or even just want to have an influence on what the future of the magazine might look like, you should contribute your thoughts to their 2018 audience survey.

Our 2018 audience survey is online to help gauge how we can provide what you need to be a better developers. Whether you subscribe to the magazine, listen to the podcast, or just visit phparch.com, I want to here from you. I’m no fan of long surveys so I’ve kept it short and to the point. It should take about 10 to 15 minutes at most to complete.

The questions on the survey differ slightly for subscribers versus non-subscribers. There's questions about:

• why you subscribe/don't subscribe
• if you know what a subscription comes with
• preferred distribution method (PDF, print, ePub, etc)
• their php[podcast]

There's also some questions for general demographics around your job, technologies commonly used and preferred devices. Help php[architect] magazine keep providing the content that PHP developers need and can help them enhance their careers - follow out the survey today!

On the php[architect] site today they've posted the announcement of the release of the magazine's latest issue: September 2018 - Magniphpicent 7.3

Articles in this edition include:

• "PHP 7.3 is On Track!" by Damien Seguy
• "Upgrading Old Legacy Apps to PHP 7 and Beyond" by Sammy Kaye Powers
• "Using the Symfony Workflow Component as a State Machine for Ecommerce" by Michelle Sanver

All of the usual columns are back too with helpful hints and information about time estimates, thinking like an attacker, describing tests and many more. You can find out more about this issue and pick up a copy of your own on the php[architect] site.

php[architect] magazine has posted the announcement of the release of their August 2018 issue: Masterful Code Management.

This issue includes articles like:

• "Debugging PHP With Xdebug" by Mark Niebergall
• "Pro Parsing Techniques with PHP, Part Three: Using Regular Expressions" by Michael Schrenk
• "MySQL Generated Columns, Views, and Triggers" by Dave Stokes

All of the usual columns are back too including tips for using PhpStorm, using gitflow, secure token management and PHP community. You can pick up a copy to call our own from the php[architect] site and, if you're curious about the contents and want to "try before you buy", they've posted a free PDF of the "Using Regular Expressions" article to give you a taste.

php[architect] magazine has posted the announcement about the release of their latest issue today - the July 2018 edition: Navigating State.

Articles in this issue include:

• "State in the Stateless World" by Luka Mužini?. See how to model complicated workflows with existing PHP packages.
• "Pro Parsing Techniques with PHP, Part Two: Fault Tolerance" by Michael Schrenk. See how to build error-resistant parsers.
• "Making Use of Our Robot Overlords" by Brian Thompson shares how he automated his team’s deployment.
• "MySQL Without The SQL—Oh My!" by Dave Stokes explains how to use MySQL as a JSON document store.

The usual columns have all returned with tips from the "dev trenches", security advice, community and contributions and if programmers are actually needed anymore. If you're interested in the content and want a small sample, check out the free article for this month (Dave Stokes' MySQL article). For more information about the article and to pick up a copy of your own, check out the php[architect] site

The php[architect] podcast has released their latest episode (Episode #9) covering the contents of the magazine's April 2018 issue: Testing in Practice. In this episode hosts Eric van Johnson and John Congdon are joined by guests Robert Basic and Oscar Merida.

Our hosts, Eric van Johnson and John Congdon dive into Testing in Practice and the April 2018 issue of php[architect] magazine.

[In the episode] Eric and John discuss unit testing, test suites, static analysis, authentication with Laravel and more. Oscar talks about the importance of training for employees, rants against image carousels, and requirements gathering. [There's also] an interview with Robert Basic, one of the contributors to Mockery.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed to get notified when new shows are released.

php[architect] magazine has announced the publication of their latest issue, the March 2018 edition: Long Running PHP.

Some of the articles featured in this issue include:

• "PHP Daemons and Long-Running Processes" by Tim Lytle
• "Evolving PHP" by Chris Pitt
• "Containers Are a Pile of Lies! Part Two" by Larry Garfield
• "Hands on With Accessibility" by Derek Binkley

Other topics mentions in the usual columns cover the Lumen framework, code reviews, signed Git commits, running a user group and the use of Twitter for PHP development. You can check out the full list of articles in this latest issue and get a copy of your own on the php[architect] site. If you're interested in the content of the issue, be sure to check out this month's free article.

On the php[architect] site they've posted an article that appeared in their December 2017 issue, an article that introduces Libsodium (by Eric Mann), a new addition to PHP's "security toolbelt" for encryption.

By the time you read this, the PHP community should have introduced the world to the newest version of our favorite language. This latest version adds better support for type annotations, allows trailing commas in lists (just like JavaScript and other dynamic languages) and introduced several security improvements. The most notable security addition, however, is the introduction of the Sodium cryptographic library as a core extension.

In the article he covers the basics of the Sodium library (that libsodium is built on top of) and what makes it different from other encryption methods. He also talks about what's been done to support it on pre-PHP 7.2 versions including the sodium_compat polyfill library and the PECL extension for PHP 7.0+. Example code is included showing how to use this new functionality via native functions once support for it has been compiled in.