On the Zen of Coding site they've posted a look forward at versions of several popular frameworks coming in 2018. Their list includes Phalcon 3, Symfony 4 and Laravel 5.x.

It’s that time of the year again, when we take a look at the world of PHP MVC frameworks. We get ready for the trends of 2018 and plan our roadmaps. Also, we’ll take a quick detour to look at some seagues in the areas beyond PHP MVC.

Web development changes year over year, if not faster. MVC has been a revolutionary paradigm for modern web apps. It helped millions of developers build awesome applications and launch exciting startups.

The post includes a Google Trends chart showing the popularity of searches for various frameworks with Laravel, Symfony and CodeIgniter taking the top three spots overall. It then starts with a high level view of some of the recent changes and trends in several of the frameworks, moving into more detail for each (and some of "the rest" including CakePHP, Zend Framework and Yii. It then discusses microservices, how they relate to MVC and the continuing importance of backend functionality.

On the SitePoint PHP blog editor Bruno Skvorc has posted a tutorial helping you get up and running with PHP 7 and Phalcon in five minutes on a Homestead Improved virtual machine.

You may remember our past infatuation with Phalcon, the fastest PHP framework.

In this post, we’ll go through the process of getting it up and running in 5 minutes on one of our <a href="http://www.sitepoint.com/quick-tip-get-homestead-vagrant-vm-running/>Homestead Improved instances. If you’re not interested in why or what Phalcon is, just skip ahead to “Setting it up”.

He starts with a brief recap of what the Phalcon framework is (including Zephir), some history behind it and the latest advancement around the framework: LTS support for v3.0. The tutorial then gets into the setup and configuration of the VM along with PHP 7 and the latest stable version of Phalcon. He then uses the sample application provided by Phalcon and getting it boostrapped and running.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a tutorial posted for the Heroku users out there showing you how to install custom PHP extensions on the service as a part of your deployment. Heroku is a platform-as-a-service hosting provider that allows for flexibility in the architecture of your systems and spin up/tear down to happen easily and on demand.

In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to install custom extensions on Heroku. Specifically, we’ll be installing Phalcon.

He walks you through creating an account on Heroku first and getting the Heroku toolbelt system installed for your operating system. He then starts in on the Phalcon (a C-based PHP framework) installation including all needed supporting packages/extensions. He uses the PHP buildpack and creates a shell script that is executed when the deployment happens. He includes the commands and configuration to handle the deployment and test the resulting installation.

Rami Alnawas has posted an interesting tutorial for the Phalcon users out there showing one way you can unit test your models. It's based on his own experience with the framework in a current project.

My first contribution to the PHP community in general, and Phalcon folks in particular, was the introduction of MVC Functional Testing with PHPUnit, this meant that Applications developed using Phalcon Framework could be unit tested by requesting a url then asserting that the response is handled by a specific action within the controller. [...] To date, my latest addition is an example of how to unit test code that utilises Phalcon models, mainly the various static find methods. The code is available on github and the coverage report is coveralls.io.

He shows it at work, creating a simple "Popup" model and a facade to help with making instances for testing. He also includes the code to test this facade, checking the results of methods like "fetchall", "select" and "execute".

On the SitePoint PHP blog today Bruno Skvorc has written up the first part of his look at installing Ghost with Nginx and Phalcon on his hosting provider. This is the first post in his "showdown" series of trials on various CMS systems.

You might be wondering why I’m writing about Ghost on a PHP oriented channel – this series will be a showdown of all the various PHP based CMS’ I can find, benchmarked against each other and against Ghost, as I look for the next best alternative. Since my DigitalOcean droplet already runs Nginx as a reverse proxy for the blog, I’ll also be deploying all the CMS’ on that same installation, each on its own subdomain.

He walks you through the whole process from start to finish:

• Installing PHP on Nginx
• Setting up a virtual host on a subdomain
• Installing Phalcon

On the SitePoint PHP blog Bruno Skvorc has posted a new tutorial showing you how to get PHP extensions installed on Nitrous.io, an online environment combining an IDE and PaaS hosting.

Inspired by a comment on my previous article, I realized Nitrous was still a bit too complicated to customize properly. In this tutorial, we’ll glide through installing cURL and Phalcon on a Nitrous.io PHP box.

He continues on from his previous article and shows how to detect cURL support and how to build it from the PHP source into an extension. He helps you get the source for the older PHP version Nitrous.io has installed and the commands you'll need to build the extension. With it installed and enabled in the php.ini, he also installs the Phalcon extension.

The SitePoint blog has posted a new tutorial by author Thien Tran Duy showing you how to send emails with Swift through a Phalcon-based application via Gmail.

Today, sending emails is considered the basic functionality of any web application. Usually, an email is sent to notify the user of some kind of activity that has taken place on the website, such as when he registers the account, updates information, or when new friends have been found. In this short tutorial I’ll show you how to send emails via Gmail quickly from within a Phalcon sample application. You can download the full source code from GitHub. We'll be building functionality which lets us send a confirmation email, and reacts to the click of said confirmation email.

The tutorial walks you through the entire process from start to finish, complete with code examples. It helps you set up the Phalcon project, modify the configuration, set up models and create the basic controller. You'll need to either install Swift via Composer or by just adding the files to the vendor directory though. The script uses this library to send the message, store the hash in an "email_confirmations" table and verify it once the user returns.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a new article about the latest version of Phalcon (v2.0) and an example of it in use.

I’ve written about Phalcon before, and we’ve got a variety of articles on the framework published already, which is apparent if you just visit the . In fact, not so long ago, I wrote about Zephir, Phalcon’s noble initiative to make building PHP extensions accessible to everyone. Today, a new milestone has been reached by the team, and one that definitely warrants discussion. Way ahead of time, the Phalcon team announced the imminent release of Phalcon 2.0 alpha 1.

He introduces this new version, noting that this is a full rewrite of the framework in a new language, Zaphir (a derivative of PHP). He then gets into using Zephir to make an example extension, complete with a screencast and sample code. He finishes off the post with some information about how you can contribute back to the project and help increase its test coverage.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today Bruno Skvorc goes through the full installation process around getting Nginx and Phalcon up and running on an OpenShift instance.

In this tutorial, adapted from the step by step trial and error procedure of duythien, and with his full blessing, we'll cover the installation procedure of Phaclon on yet another environment: OpenShift. The procedure is bloody – OpenShift does not make it easy for us to deploy custom environments – but the rewards are well worth it.

As he mentioned, it's not the easiest process, but he's laid it all out there to help make it simple for you. He's broken it up into a number of different steps:

• Setting up your OpenShift account (using the free tier)
• Creating and cloning an application
• Cloning a helper repo with a ".openshift" file included
• Grabbing the latest Phalcon and making the config file to set it up correctly
• Configuring Nginx

On the SitePoint PHP blog Bruno Skvorc has posted what could be "best PHP frameworks for 2014". The results were compiled from the feedback of a survey they recently took during the past week.

We asked these questions to decide which frameworks deserve our attention in 2014 the most. The prerequisite for participation was merely having experience in more than one framework, seeing as it's pointless to ask someone what their favorite bar was if they've only drunk in one place.

In the end, the results showed some interesting trends in the choice of PHP framework and their overall popularity. The three topping the popularity charts were (in this order) Laravel, Phalcon then Symfony2. Other mainstay frameworks like Zend Framework, Yii and CodeIgniter were ranked lower in the list. He goes through the results and provides a bit of background on the feedback, including how much of the original data had to be filtered out for one reason or another. He also includes a list of "noteworthy answers" from various folks responding to the survey. His personal choice? Phalcon because of it's overall performance and the community around it.

So which framework seems most promising for 2014? Which should you switch to in the new year? Is it worth it? That's entirely up to you – as always, it depends on your comfort level, the project requirements, and time you have to study new things.