The Twilio blog has a new post from PHP developer advocate Margaret Staples showing you how to integrate Twilio and Laravel to create a group video chat system. This makes use of the Twilio Video API to build the connections between users via a Laravel application.

While words alone are powerful, the inflections of people’s voices, the gestures and expressions we unconsciously flow through during conversation all contain a wealth of information often lost to us in our technology driven communications.

Using Twilio’s Video API you can now add the richness of face to face interactions to any web project.

Here we’ll look at how to create a Laravel web application that gives users the ability to join existing video groups or create their own. You can preview what we’re building here.

The tutorial starts with a few assumptions (things you'll need to have already set up) and a link to a GitHub repository that provides some of the boilerplate code. After a few setup commands the application should be ready to add the Twilio API/account configuration values and the addition of three routes for room joins, creates and listing. Next she creates the controller to handle the incoming requests and the views for the page output including the video and audio service provided by a Twilio script. Finally they show how to demo the result and include a few troubleshooting steps you can follow if something seems to be going wrong.

Markus Pullmann has a new post to his blog about setting up XDebug in your PHP installation to help you narrow down those elusive issues more quickly.

Debugging locally is a nice improvement to have no debugger at all, but in many situations there is the need to debug on production server, where the application is running on the web. There are different reasons for that, but the most important one for me is, that my local environment / installation is different from the one i have on servers in data center and bugs can be related to the environment.

He walks you through the installation and server-side configuration of XDebug first then shows how to install the Komodo Remote Debugging Client to help with multi-user debugging setups. He mentions setting up the debugging on the client/IDE side, but there's no specific instructions for any particular IDE - just how it works overall.

From the Otto on WordPress blog there's a recent post (made more useful by the release of WordPress 3) about how to use the multi-site abilities of this latest version to create multiple sites with their own domain names attached to each.

The other day, Klint Finley wrote a very good walkthrough of using the new Multisite functionality of WordPress 3.0. In the comments, a lot of people wanted to know how to use your own Top-Level-Domains. Since I’m doing that now, here’s a quick walkthrough/how-to guide.

He uses the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin to get the job done and, via screenshots and a little bit of code, shows you how to use the admin panel to easily set up the domains and the sites they should resolve to.

If you've been using your WordPress installation in a single-user fashion and have been looking to get more people in on the fun, you'll probably want to update to the WPMU edition of the popular blogging engine. It's not the easiest thing to accomplish, so the WordPress Arena site is here with a guide to walk you through each step of the way.

[WPMU] is most famously used for WordPress.com where it serves tens of millions of hits on millions of blogs each day. Many bloggers interested in using WordPress MU already have a WordPress blog. Unfortunately, I think it is not possible to turn WordPress installs into WordPress MU installs directly uploading new files and upgrading.

The post includes a 17-step process you'll need to follow to get your current WordPress installation migrated over intact (with a few sub-steps along the way). At the end, there's a brief tour of the new panels you'll have for things like the blogs, users, themes and administration.