In their latest post the HHVM project (of Facebook) has laid out the next six months ahead for the development and progression on the project. In it they talk some about their "themes" and overall Open Source goals planned for the first part of 2014.

The HHVM team has just wrapped up its planning for the first half of 2014. We’d like to share our plans, providing you a bit of context. We’ve been making steady progress on HHVM’s compatibility with PHP in the wild, but we still have a lot of work ahead of us. We’re using unit test pass rates as a proxy for success measurement, but you can help by adding HHVM to your Travis configuration, and reporting bugs and issues through GitHub. We are resourced to help support a couple of major HHVM deployments, which we hope has the side effect of exposing us to “non-Facebook” deployment and maintenance challenges.

We are also going to push for a more open development model, with the goal of increasing our community participation. We’ll have more to say on what this means later on. Stay tuned!

They also cover some of the work being done to increase the overall efficiency, reducing CPU time and memory consumption. There's also mention of work being done on a guide to "hacking" in the HHVM, reducing some complexity in the compiler and the conversion to a full HNI extension interface.

Derick Rethans (master of all things date and time in PHP) has a new post to his blog showing how to correctly get the "next month" since the date string parser doesn't understand how to use that string directly.

Over and over again PHP users complain that next month in PHP's date-string parser doesn't go to the next month, but instead skips to the one after next month.

He describes what happens internally, how PHP bumps up the month and counts the number of days, and how you can use some of newer features in the PHP 5.3 release to get the first day of the next month. Specifically, this means using the "first day of next month" string for the modify() call on the DateTime object. If you're not on PHP 5.3 yet, Derick also includes a method in the comments to do it a slightly different way.

The symfony blog has start up their own "advent calendar" of sorts (similar to what they've done in previous years) - creating an entire application in a single month, from December 1st through 31st. This time its the jobeet.org jobs website. Here's the list of each day:

• Do you know Jobeet?
• Jobeet - Day 1: Starting up the Project
• Jobeet - Day 2: The Project
• Jobeet - Day 3: The Data Model
• Jobeet - Day 4: The Controller and the View
• Jobeet - Day 5: The Routing
• Jobeet - Day 6: More with the Model
• Jobeet - Day 7: Playing with the Category Page
• Jobeet - Day 8: The Unit Tests
• Jobeet - Day 9: The Functional Tests
• Jobeet - Day 10: The Forms
  
  
• Jobeet - Day 11: Testing your Forms
• Jobeet - Day 12: The Admin Generator
• Jobeet - Day 13: The User
• Jobeet - Day 14: The Lazy Day
• Jobeet - Day 15: Feeds
• Jobeet - Day 16: Web Services
• Jobeet - Day 17: Search
• Jobeet - Day 18: AJAX
• Jobeet - Day 19: Internationalization and Localization
  
  
• Jobeet - Day 20: The Plugins
• Jobeet - Day 21: The Design Day
• Jobeet - Day 22: The Cache
• Jobeet - Day 23: The Deployment
• Jobeet - Day 24: Another Look at symfony

Stay tuned to the Symfony blog for more updates!

Lorna Mitchell has posted a countdown - only one month until this year's PHP North West Conference.

In a month's time I'll be in Manchester, ready for the PHP North West conference. The conference is a one-day event (Saturday, 22nd November), although the social side of things will kick off the night before. Tickets are 50 GBP for the early bird, 35 GBP for students and concessions - so register now.

She mentions a few things surrounding the conference like the excellent speaker list and the free subscription to php|architect magazine all attendees will receive.

Check out the conference website for more information and to reserve your spot. Hurry! Time's running out!

Now that we're in to May, there's only one thing on a PHPer's mind (well some of them out there) - testing! This month several groups all around the world have set times for their own TestFests to dedicated time to writing up tests for PHP.

The TestFest is an event that aims at improving the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. As part of this event, local User Groups (UG) are invited to join the TestFest. [...] All it takes is someone to organize a UG to spearhead the event and to get others involved in writing phpt tests.

Several groups have set up their times (here's the list) including teh Atlanta PHP group's happening today and the Cologne/Bonn user group's happening tomorrow. If you want to get in on the action and haven't found a group, check out the list and see if there's one nearby and join up before the event starts!

Sebastian Bergmann has posted a checklist as a reminder of things to bring with you to your local event.

On the ThinkPHP blog today, Annika Rabea shares a method for outputting dates in words rather than in the usual numbers most applications use.

Recently, I have to output the age of a date in words and didn't have a framework to work with. The first steps were to parse the given date into an array and create a timestamp with the individual parts. The difference between the timestamp of now and the created timestamp yielded the age in seconds. The result can be used to compare with seconds of a day, week, etc.

The code snippet in the post outputs the difference between two timestamps (then and now) it a bit more friendly way (ex. 4 months, 2 weeks, 2 days).

Ilia Alshanetsky posts today about the proposed "Month of PHP bugs" that Stefan Esser is proposing:

It would be interesting to see what issues he discovers, hopefully most of them have already been reported to the PHP Security Team, in which case the upcoming 5.2.1 release will provide a resolution path for affected users.

Hopefully, as Ilia states, the bugs will not turn out to be zero-day vulnerabilities and will instead be smaller issues. Either way, a bug-fix patch will probably soon follow.

Either way, I have to look at this as a free security audit of PHP by someone with a clue about security and ultimately, in the long run it will only make PHP better, even if March is going to be rather busy.

Ilia Alshanetsky posts today about the proposed "Month of PHP bugs" that Stefan Esser is proposing:

It would be interesting to see what issues he discovers, hopefully most of them have already been reported to the PHP Security Team, in which case the upcoming 5.2.1 release will provide a resolution path for affected users.

Hopefully, as Ilia states, the bugs will not turn out to be zero-day vulnerabilities and will instead be smaller issues. Either way, a bug-fix patch will probably soon follow.

Either way, I have to look at this as a free security audit of PHP by someone with a clue about security and ultimately, in the long run it will only make PHP better, even if March is going to be rather busy.

In part of an effort to work out some of the 'kinks' in PHP (as far as the security of the language itself), Stefan Esser has proposed a "Month of Bugs" for PHP. The idea is to release security issues found, one for each day - the month's hasn't been specified yet - with complete vulnerability information.

While it is true that many PHP applications are written by people with no clue about security it is absolutely not true that PHP is a secure programming language. I think it is necessary to make ALL people aware of this.

No word yet on when this month will start, but we will keep you posted as soon as it's out. If you'd like to check out the community's response to this effort, check out some of the comments already posted to this announcement on the PHP Security Blog.

In part of an effort to work out some of the 'kinks' in PHP (as far as the security of the language itself), Stefan Esser has proposed a "Month of Bugs" for PHP. The idea is to release security issues found, one for each day - the month's hasn't been specified yet - with complete vulnerability information.

While it is true that many PHP applications are written by people with no clue about security it is absolutely not true that PHP is a secure programming language. I think it is necessary to make ALL people aware of this.

No word yet on when this month will start, but we will keep you posted as soon as it's out. If you'd like to check out the community's response to this effort, check out some of the comments already posted to this announcement on the PHP Security Blog.