The Zend Framework blog has posted their official announcement of the release of Expressive version 3, the latest major release for the Zend Framework-based microframework based around PSR-15 middleware.

Expressive 3 embraces modern PHP, and requires PHP 7.1 or higher. Strong type-hinting, including return type hints, make both our job and your job easier and more predictable. The ability to use all modern PHP features helps us deliver a solid base for your application.

Expressive 3 provides full support for the PSR-15 (Middleware and Request Handlers) standard. [...] Expressive 3 massively refactors its internals as well. [...] Expressive 3 provides more command line tooling and tooling improvements in order to make developing your application easier.

[...] Finally, we recognize that Expressive has changed massively between versions 1 and 3, while simultaneously keeping its primary API stable and unchanged. However, to help users find the information they need for the version they run, we have rolled out versioned documentation, with each version providing only information specific to its release cycle.

The post also lists out some of the new components including zend-expressive-session, zend-expressive-csrf and zend-expressive-hal. There's also links to more information about upgrading, community resources and a "thank you" section to several people that helped get the project to this version 3 release.

The TutsPlus.com site has continued their series covering the use of PHP and the Yii2 framework to build an application from the ground up (a "startup"). In this latest post the author covers some major feature enhancements, how to handle them and the code to add in the one he chose - an "Activity Planning" feature.

These days I'm most often working to add small incremental improvements to Meeting Planner. The basics work pretty well, and I'm trying to gradually improve the application based on my vision and people's feedback. Sometimes, my vision is for a bigger change, and that can be harder now that the codebase has grown so much.

In today's tutorial, I'm going to talk about ways to think about making bigger changes to an existing codebase. Specifically, I'll walk you through the impacts of adding the ability for meeting participants to collaboratively brainstorm and decide on activities, i.e. what we should do when we meet up.

His intent is to expand the scheduling support for the product to add the idea of "activities" to the invitations. These are suggestions of things to do during the time specified (if there's not only one option). He starts off by scoping out the changes that will be required including both the customer and code facing impacts. The tutorial then goes through some of the highlights of the code added to include this new feature. Finally he loops back around and reflects on the changes made during this latest addition and how his expectations measured up against the reality of the work done.

On the Zend Framework blog today Matthew Weier O'Phinney has posted the official announcement of the release of Zend Expressive v2.0, the latest major release with several large changes.

Today we're excited to announce Expressive 2.0! What has changed since 1.0 was released last year? The short version: we've been providing changes that standardize, simplify, and streamline application development in Expressive.

Updates in this latest version include:

• PSR-11 (ContainerInterface) support
• Programmatic pipelines
• An emphasis on modularized applications
• Extensible routing and dispatch middleware

The post gets into details on each of the above topics and several others. It also shows how to install this latest version via Composer (or install the skeleton application to get up and running quickly).

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.

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.

Fans of the Monolog logging library (used by loads of major PHP-based projects too) will be interested in checking out this post about version 2 from Jordi Boggiano, lead developer on the project.

Monolog's first commit was on February 17th, 2011. That is almost 5 years ago! I have now been thinking for quite a while that it would be nice to start on a v2, and being able to drop some baggage.

One of the main questions when doing a major release is which minimum PHP version to support going forward. Last summer I decided I wanted to do a big jump from 5.3 and directly target PHP 7. It provides a lot of nice features as well as performance improvements, and as Monolog is one of the most installed packages on Packagist I wanted to help nudge everyone towards PHP 7.

Now that PHP 7 has been released, he's moving even more towards this goal for version 2 of the popular tool. He talks about "the road forward" and links to a milestone that's been set up with issues to correct and features to update before v2.0 can be called stable. He does offer a word of warning too - if you use dev-master for your Composer installs, update it to use ^1.17 instead as the main branch will break soon with the work for v2.

On the Symfony blog there's a new post from Javier Eguiluz talking about improvements to the Symfony release process that will be starting with the 3.0.0 stable release (already release so already in place).

The Symfony Release Process is arguably one of the best selling points of the Symfony project. Thanks to our predictable and transparent process, companies can plan years in ahead their Symfony integration.

The recent launch of Symfony 2.8, which will be the last minor version of the 2.x branch, made us think about further tweaks in the release process. That's why during his past SymfonyCon Paris 2015 keynote, Fabien Potencier announced the new Symfony release process.

The main changes for the process are around how many minor versions will be published, standard vs long term support status of these releases and the timing of major/minor releases. With this schedule in place, it's projected that Symfony 4 will be released in November of 2017.

The Slim Framework project has officially announced the release of the next major version of their popular microframework: Slim 3.0.0.:

We are delighted to release the first stable version of Slim 3, 3.0.0 following a series of release candidates. [...] Slim 3 is a major update with all parts of the framework updated.

New features in this major version release include:

• the change to a container-interop compatible dependency injection system
• complete PSR-7 support
• an update to internal classes to code against interfaces rather than concrete classes
• route callback binding to $this (the Container instance)

They've also gotten rid of some of the "cruft" that had built up over previous versions and slimmed down (pardon the pun) the codebase making it even simpler and more component driven. They've posted installation instructions to help you get started and a simple skeleton application you can drop in and be up and running quickly.

In a major announcement to the PHP.net site, the long awaited stable version of the next major released of PHP has finally come: PHP 7.0.0 has been released!

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.0.0. This release marks the start of the new major PHP 7 series.

PHP 7.0.0 comes with a new version of the Zend Engine, numerous improvements and new features such as

• Improved performance: PHP 7 is up to twice as fast as PHP 5.6
• Significantly reduced memory usage
• Abstract Syntax Tree
• Consistent 64-bit support
• Improved Exception hierarchy
• Many fatal errors converted to Exceptions
• Secure random number generator
• Removed old and unsupported SAPIs and extensions
• The null coalescing operator (??)
• Return and Scalar Type Declarations
• Anonymous Classes
• Zero cost asserts

As always you can download this latest released from the main downloads page or from windows.php.net for the Windows binaries. They've also posted a migration guide to help you move your current application up to this latest version.

The Laracasts site has posted a set of videos that can help you learn all about PHP7 and get you up to speed before this next major release is available for download (well, a stable release anyway).

Slated for release in October, 2015, PHP 7 brings a wealth of new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements. If you're curious, come with me, as I demonstrate what's new!

The videos cover some of the major new features coming to the language including:

• Scalar Typehints FREE
• Spaceships
• The Null Coalesce Operator NEW FREE
• Grouped Imports NEW FREE

More videos are coming too, including one already listed showing how to use anonymous classes. Keep an eye on this series to learn all about PHP 7 before it's even released.