In this post over on Medium.com Ond?ej Mirtes looks at what he calls the "Three Pillars of Static Analysis in PHP" - three kinds of testing you can do to catch errors "at rest" in your codebase.

My credo is that everything that can be automated should be automated. Computers are really good at repeating tedious tasks and they don’t usually make mistakes while us squishy humans are defined by making mistakes everywhere we go.

[...] In the following article, I’d like to introduce three tools that will help you to find errors and inconsistencies in your codebase. If your build integrating these tools finishes successfully, you can be pretty sure your application is in a good shape.

His list of three tools covers checking for:

• syntax errors using PHP-Parallel-Lint
• PHP_CodeSniffer "sniffs" to ensure code consistency
• using PHPStan to check for more complex bugs and issues than the other two

He covers some of the things the last option verifies and links to another introductory article about the tool to help you get started.

php[architect] magazine has just announced the release of the latest edition of their magazine, the October 2016 issue: Pillars of Development.

Articles in this issue include:

• Juggle Arrays Using Functional Callbacks (Andrew Koebbe)
• Dev Divas: History’s Heroines of Computing, Part One (Vesna Vuynovich Kovach)
• The Strangler Pattern, Part One (Edward Barnard)
• API Tips From the Front Line (Anna Filina)

The usual columns are also back including the "Education Station", "Security Corner" and "Leveling Up". If you'd like a sample of the contents of the issue, they're also offering a free article, "COTS, Open Source, Build it Yourself, or Something in Between?" by Eli White. If you pick up your own copy of this latest edition directly from the php[architect] website either as an individual issue or as a subscription (either digital only, print only or combined).

On the Fortrabbit.com blog today they have a post where they share what they see as the 10 Pillars of PHP Development. It's a set of ten things they see as the most important to consider in a developer's work.

For most of us PHP developers writing applications now compared to ten or so years ago is quite a different endeavor. [...] This has changed in recent years. Classical web sites are becoming more and more the domain of specialized SaaS. [...] So web developers changed themselves by specializing and concentrating on what cannot be automated so easily: web applications. Along with this came a new mindset on how PHP development should be done and what tools should be used.

Their list of ten includes both generic topics (with a few subtopics for explanation) and specific technical items like:

• Code management
• Tests
• Dependencies and modularization
• Runtime data
• Deployment

Check out the rest of the post for other "pillars" in their list and explanations for each.