On the Zend Framework blog today Enrico Zimuel has posted an announcement about the zend-db component including a look at the new release and the future of the component.

Today, we released zend-db 2.9.0! This is our first new feature release in over 18 months, and contains 7 bug fixes, 6 new features, numerous unit test additions, and many documentation improvements.

zend-db is an important component of many PHP projects, and we know that its support is crucial for many people. As such, we allocated a number of weeks to triaging the various open issues and patches (more than 50) to ensure we would provide a stable release.

The post lists out the issues fixed and the features added, linking to the bugs that were files related to each. It then talks about the future of the component, noting that a v3.0 release is expected to come in 2018 and will include a lot of new features. This will help to make working with more modern features of the various databases easier directly from the code (without as much manual query creation or hackery). The post finishes with some thanks to those that contributed to this v2.9.0 release.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a tutorial showing you how to use Laravel Envoyer or Deployer with SemaphoreCI and popular continuous integration service.

Test automation, continuous integration, and continuous delivery are quite widespread in the community now. This brought to life multiple services trying to make the process more enjoyable and less overwhelming for developers, so they can focus on delivering software instead of building/configuring tools to do that. One of those services is SemaphoreCI.

In this article, we’re going to cover how to use our own deploy scripts and tools to continue the deployment process after a successful test.

They then show you how to create the Deployer configuration file to make the deployment to the remote Digital Ocean servers of a Laravel-based application. Most of the steps are in copying the local files up to the remote server as a "staging" environment. He then hops back over to the SemaphoreCI service to create the deployment plan for the project using the "deployer.phar" command line tool, linking it to the push of new code. They then move to the same process just defined via the Laravel Envoyer tool and a similar command line call.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post from author Christopher Vundi that shows the use of Laravel Cashier to create a custom site connecting to Braintree for subscription handling.

Subscriptions to services online are something extremely common – from subscribing to music streaming services to tutorial sites to access premium content.

With Laravel 5, we saw the introduction of Laravel Cashier, an official Laravel package to help developers manage Stripe’s and Braintree’s subscription billing services without writing most of the boilerplate subscription billing code. [...] In this tutorial, we will be building a dummy Courses site with Braintree subscriptions. In the process, we will learn how to use the various methods offered by Cashier.

This part of the series will help you with some of the setup steps you'll need to create the environment for your application. It also shows you how the custom code would look to allow a user of your system to subscribe to a custom plan. They walk you through all of the setup steps to follow and the code you'll need to make the subscription process work. Some screenshots are included so you can ensure you're setting things up in the correct places.

On the NetTuts.com site today there's a new tutorial showing you what you can do when your WordPress site is hacked.

One of the worst things that can happen to your website just happened: It's been hacked. Somebody broke into your computer and got passwords, or your passwords were weak, or somebody exploited a security vulnerability caused by WordPress or your hosting provider, or something else happened that let a hacker hack your website...What do we do now? It's not the time to feel sorry for yourself, it's time to take action and bring back your website.

They start with a brief look at how a WordPress site might be hacked, not specific exploits, but topics and types of vulnerabilities. Following this they talk about thier recommended steps to do when the hack is discovered including:

• Shut It Down NOW!
• Contact Your Hosting Provider for Details
• Find Out What Caused It and Take Action
• Fix and Double-Check Everything and Go Live Again

Each step comes with a summary of the steps inside and even a "checklist" of things to verify before bringing the site back up.

As some developers move on in their careers, they start to progress more towards a management role. Sometimes this comes in the form of a "product manager" since most of their knowledge is wrapped around the product(s) they've been working on. However, making the move up from developer to product manager can be a difficult transition. In this new post to the SitePoint Web blog, Ernest Sliter tries to help with his own three-stage advice.

It’s certainly not uncommon for developers or other employees serving in technical roles to eventually transition to product management. Some developers may find they enjoy managing the product road map and solving customers’ problems rather than writing code and building the product themselves. Other seasoned engineers may be searching for a suitable career transition into a management position. If you’re interested in moving to product management in the future, here are three critical steps to make the transition.

For each of his steps he provides a summary of what the choice or action entails and includes a few sub-points that can help:

• Decide Whether You’re Right for Product Management
• Expand Your Knowledge of Product Management
• Take Action!

On PHPMaster.com there's a new tutorial by J Armando Jeronymo that shows how you can run Monte Carlo simulations in PHP (more on that simulation type here).

One of the exciting things in the 1980′s was programming simulations to solve complex analytical problems, and one of the most useful techniques employed was running Monte Carlo simulations. The approach repeatedly runs a simulation many times over to calculate the most likely outcome. Although PHP isn’t known as a scientific or research programming language, Monte Carlo simulations can easily be written in a PHP web app. In this article, I’ll show you how.

He walks you through the whole problem he tries to solve with the simulation - a multi-step trip that involved different roads, situations and possible stops along the way. He breaks it out into the various stages (labeled with letters) and shows how you might render this as a "MyTrip" class with distances in "travel minutes". Following along with the Monte Carlo randomness, though, he shows how to inject a bit of randomness into the mix accounting for some of the trouble he had along the way.

The Bakery (the CakePHP site) has posted a list of things to come in the 3.0 release of the popular PHP framework.

Since its creation, more than 7 years ago, CakePHP has grown with a life of its own. Its main goal has always been to empower developers with tools that are both easy to learn and use, leverage great libraries requiring low documentation and low dependencies too. We've had several big releases along these years and an ever growing community. Being one of the most popular frameworks out there and probably the first one (!) we have also gotten a lot of criticism from the developer community in general. We have, though, accepted it and learnt from our mistakes to keep building the best PHP framework there is.

Some of the coming improvements include:

• Drop support for 5.2.x and support 5.4+ only
• Use traits were possible and makes sense
• Model layer rewrite
• Improve Router
• Improve bootstrapping process to allow more developer control and better performance

You can find more about the current features of the framework on it's main project site.

On the Joomla Blogger site there's an update on the release plan for the upcoming 1.6 version of the popular content management system:

When Joomla 1.6 Alpha was released a few months ago, the original plan was to release the beta version six weeks after that, in August. However, the time came and no beta arrived. So what happened, and what's the status of Joomla 1.6 as of now? Hannes Papenberg from the Joomla 1.6 Release Team has done a write-up on the current status. He explains why Joomla 1.6 beta 1 was delayed and outlines some of the features we will be seeing.

Topics discussed include the access control functionality, the project's involvement with the Google Summer of Code and some of the other features currently in development. Hannes hints at a beta release of the 1.6 version in around two to three weeks.

If you're thinking of trying your hand at creating your own PHP framework, you might want to check out this post from Matrin Rusev about some of the lessons he learned (the hard way) about framework construction.

After using Codeigniter, CakePHP and Zend Framework for a while I decided to build my own framework. I wanted to include some features that I couldn’t find the way I like them in none of the projects I tested. These are some lessons I learned the hard way. I hope you’d find some useful tips for your software projects.

The post looks a a few different topics - doing good planning before development starts, using third-party libraries, planning out the syntax the components inside of your framework will use, how to handle debugging and two tools you can use to benchmark the end result.

Continuing his series looking at models in Zend Framework applications, Matthew Weier O'Phinney has posted this new tutorial focusing on model infrastructure - figuring out what your models are really for and how to write to that.

The Model is a complex subject. However, it is often boiled down to either a single model class or a full object relational mapping (ORM). [...] When you think in these terms, you start breaking your system into discrete pieces that you need to manipulate, as well as consider how each piece relates to the others. This type of exercise also helps you stop thinking of your model in terms of database tables; instead, your database becomes the container in which data is persisted from one use of your model to the next. Your model instead is an object that can do things with either incoming or stored data -- or even completely autonomously.

He notes that he is a fan of the domain model method and uses this method as he works through the different topics of building out your most useful model:

• asking "What are you modeling?"
• setting up the "gateway" into your domain model
• working with value objects/record sets

All of this along with plenty of code to illustrate his points...