On the Laravel News site they've posted a quick tutorial showing how to add in "maintenance mode" management functionality into Laravel Nova, the recently released administration panel product for Laravel-based applications.

If for some reason you’ve been on another planet (see what I did there?), Laravel Nova is Now Available and the community has been rather busy building open-source tools around Nova.

One of those open-source tools is by David Piesse, who created a Laravel Nova extension that allows you to manage the maintenance mode of your application from Nova

The package to add the functionality is easily installed via Composer and integrate via a service provider. This then adds a new toggle to the administration panel's UI to enable or disable maintenance mode (as well as an icon showing the current status).

In a new post to his site Matt Stauffer revisits the topic of "strict" mode with MySQL and Laravel with some customizations you can make around how your application uses it.

If you remember my post How To Disable MySQL Strict Mode on Laravel Forge (Ubuntu), you'll remember that MySQL 5.7 introduced something we've been casually calling "strict mode," which is really a combination of new modes that, in sum, make MySQL process your queries a little more strictly than before.

In my previous post I showed how to disable it on Ubuntu, but since then, Adam Wathan has added a feature to Laravel that allows you to define whether you're using "strict" mode and also allows you to customize exactly which modes you'd like enabled--all in code.

He briefly goes back over what the "strict" in "strict mode" means for your database and application, including a list of the set of modes it contains (essentially a grouping of modes). He then shows how to use the new feature to enable/disable it in a Laravel (5.2+) application through the database configuration. You can also get more in-depth and enable/disable individual modes that the "strict" mode contains if you need a bit more custom handling.

In a new post to his site Aaron Saray has shared two tips that can help you protect the information in your PHP sessions - two configuration options to enable that can enforce stricter standards and options enhancing their overall security.

Let’s talk a little bit about session fixation in PHP. Such a fun topic, right? Tons to get into here. But, let’s just touch the surface on two VERY SIMPLE things you can be doing now to make sure that your website is safe.

The two configuration options he mentions are ones that:

• force the session identifier to use cookies (versus also allowing it from the URL)
• enforce "strict mode" on the sessions

Each comes with a bit of description as to what the setting does and the recommended setting is to provide the most protection. One note, though: strict mode is only included in PHP 5.5.2 or greater.

In this new article Er Galvao Abbott talks about the struggle (and finally, inclusion) of type hinting in PHP, more specifically coming in PHP7, and how strict they can be.

It wasn’t easy (we knew it wouldn’t be) and certainly wasn’t pretty (we sort of knew that as well), but it’s finally official: PHP7 will come with Scalar Type Hints (STH) and an optional “strict mode”. [...] This is basically a step towards a more strict way of coding in PHP. Will we see more steps in that direction in the future? We don’t know and we’re OK with that for now. What’s brilliant about the body of work represented by these RFCs is that by implementing their concepts and specially making the “strict mode” optional the choice of being more strict remains with the programmer.

He talks some about the background of the want and need for strict typing in PHP and mentions three RFCs that will influence the type hints and handling in PHP7:

• Scalar Type Hints v5— (forked) RFC by Anthony Ferrara on Andrea Faulds’ original
• Return Type Declarations —RFC by Levi Morrison
• Exceptions in the engine— RFC by Nikita Popov

He summarizes each RFC and what it contributes to the language. He ends the post by dispelling one thing about all of this new typing functionality - PHP will remain loosely typed, this new functionality is in a "strict mode" only used when specified.

Sameer Borate has shared some examples of how to generate some meaningful statistics about the contents of your database in a new post to his site today.

Descriptive statistics can be quite useful for simple analysis of records in a database. For example, to calculate average numbers of sales or products for a particular duration, or the Variance of sales for a month etc. We can easily calculate standard descriptive statistic measures in MySQL such as MEAN, SUM, STANDARD DEVIATION, VARIANCE, MIN and MAX using built-in functions.

He includes both the SQL and a bit of PHP code showing how to get these statistics (based on a simple data set of student scores). The PHP is required to more correctly evaluate the median and mode values as it's easier to evaluate those in PHP.

Rob Allen has shared a method he's found for implementing a Zend Framework v2 in development mode, more specifically for an Apigility installation.

One feature that piqued my interested in the Apigility skeleton application was development mode. [...] Behind the scenes, this [call to public/index.php] runs an action in DevelopmentModeController which copies config/development.config.php.dist to config/development.config.php. Then there is some code in public/index.php that ensures that this file is loaded.

You can then have a ModuleManager instance specifically for the development version and configuration. This allows for a greater amount of customization and removes some requirements you might have had in production. He's also created a module that handles some of this for you automatically you can drop into your installation.

Tobias Schlitt has a great (long) post responding to a proposal made on the php.internals mailing list for the inclusion of "taint mode" in upcoming PHP versions.

Tobias starts with an overview of what "taint mode" is so that everyone's on the same page. His example involves the incoming and outgoing data usually involved in an application and how the incoming can be the most problematic when it comes to the values inside. This is where taint mode can come to the rescue. At its most basic level, it's a method for, assuming everything coming in is "tainted", creating a mechanism to automatically clean the data before it's even touched.

With the basics down, Tobias looks back to the proposal for a few additional comments. He considers the proposal a great way to introduce the functionality to the language. There are some draw backs he mentions, though, including the additional overhead of working through every inputted value.

Overall, I think this whole thing would be a great addition to PHP and I hope this could come for 6.0. What do you think?

You can also check out some other opinions on the matter:

• "Tainted mode" pour php on the Kamelot Blog

Tobias Schlitt has a great (long) post responding to a proposal made on the php.internals mailing list for the inclusion of "taint mode" in upcoming PHP versions.

Tobias starts with an overview of what "taint mode" is so that everyone's on the same page. His example involves the incoming and outgoing data usually involved in an application and how the incoming can be the most problematic when it comes to the values inside. This is where taint mode can come to the rescue. At its most basic level, it's a method for, assuming everything coming in is "tainted", creating a mechanism to automatically clean the data before it's even touched.

With the basics down, Tobias looks back to the proposal for a few additional comments. He considers the proposal a great way to introduce the functionality to the language. There are some draw backs he mentions, though, including the additional overhead of working through every inputted value.

Overall, I think this whole thing would be a great addition to PHP and I hope this could come for 6.0. What do you think?

You can also check out some other opinions on the matter:

• "Tainted mode" pour php on the Kamelot Blog