The Symfony blog has a new post featuring an interview with Pawe? J?drzejewski, the founder of the Sylius project - an ecommerce platform based on the Symfony components.

Sylius, an e-commerce project based on Symfony components, recently released its 1.0.0 stable version. After several years of work and thousands of commits from hundred of contributors, Sylius is now ready to take the e-commerce world by storm. We chatted with Pawe? J?drzejewski, founder and leader of the project, to celebrate this milestone.

In the interview Pawe? answers questions about the project itself, why it stands out from some of the other ecommerce projects, the state of ecommerce and why they chose Symfony components as the base for the project.

Armin Weihbold has continued his series looking at building APIs in PHP applications in part two covering the use of the API Platform project as a base. You can find part one here if you need to get caught up.

He picks up right where the last article ends and continues setting up the Docker environment for the application. Once he figured out a small snag in the setup he was able to get the basic documentation (the list of endpoints) up and running.

Next he creates a "material design" administration interface using React showing how he pulled in the requirements he needed to get the interface up and running. Code is included for the interface and a screenshot is included so you can see the end result.

Gonzalo Ayuso has a tutorial posted to his site showing you how to create a PHP application on a SAP platform that includes PostgreSQL and Redis via Cloud Foundry.

Keeping on with my study of SAP’s cloud platform (SCP) and Cloud Foundry today I’m going to build a simple PHP application. This application serves a simple Bootstrap landing page. The application uses a HTTP basic authentication. The credentials are validated against a PostgreSQL database. It also has a API to retrieve the localtimestamp from database server (just for play with a database server). I also want to play with Redis in the cloud too, so the API request will have a Time To Live (ttl) of 5 seconds. I will use a Redis service to do it.

He then walks you through the process of setting up both the platform and the application:

• creating the services in cloud foundry
• create our application (with either Silex or Lumen)
• built out the features
• running the application locally for testing
• connecting to the cloud servers for PostgreSQL and Redis
• set up logging
• set up basic authorization

Full code and configuration is included for each step of the way (with Lumen examples included because Silex is "dead").

The HHVM project (an alternative PHP runtime from Facebook) has made a major announcement on their blog - beginning with version 3.24 they'll no longer be trying to keep parity with the PHP language now that it has moved into PHP 7.

The HHVM team is happy about the direction PHP has taken with PHP7, and we’re proud of the role we’ve played in pushing the language and runtime to where they are today. Since the PHP community is finally saying goodbye to PHP5, we’ve decided to do so as well.

Our next LTS release, 3.24, will be cut about four months from now and will receive support for one year thereafter. It will also be the last HHVM release that commits to PHP5 support. This aligns with PHP’s own timeline of sunsetting PHP5 at the end of 2018.

[...] PHP7 is charting a new course away from PHP5, and we want to do the same, via a renewed focus on Hack. Consequently, HHVM will not aim to target PHP7. The HHVM team believes that we have a clear path toward making Hack a fantastic language for web development, untethered from its PHP origins. We’d do ourselves and our users a disservice by positioning HHVM as an uncommon, less well-documented, less compatible PHP7 runtime.

The post then lists out some of their goals for the HHVM/Hack projects moving forward including reinvesting in open source and staying focused on their needs for the platform and language. It then talks about some of the upcoming changes you can expect around support of current versions of popular PHP tools and work on tools created specifically for Hack.

Cal Evans has continued his series covering Mautic, the PHP based self-hosted marketing automation platform. This is step one in the process with his previous post in the series introducing Mautic and why he's trying it out.

This is the second post in a series titled “My Journey into Mautic”. If you are starting here, you might get an incomplete picture, you may want to check out the previous articles.

There are two things that really confuse me about Mautic, properly configuring an Email Service Provider (ESP), and segmenting & tagging. We’ll tackle the latter one in a later post, but the former is an important topic. It is also one that I do not fully understand. What is presented here is what I have learned through trial and error. it my be partially or wholly incorrect. If you find something that I’ve gotten wrong, please, by all means, correct me in the comments.

He starts by defining what an ESP service is and what it's useful for. While he had done the self-hosted email server in the past, he recommends paying for a service these days, deciding for his needs on Mailgun. He covers the difference between transactional and broadcast emails followed by the setup process he followed to get Mailgun up and working with his Mautic install.

Cal Evans, in a search to help make the marketing efforts for some of his products easier, has kicked off a series showing how to install and configure the PHP-based Mautic marketing automation platform.

Those that know me know that I have an obsession with marketing. I mean I’m no good at it, but the topic fascinates me. Almost all of the podcasts I listen to on a regular basis are marketing related. One topic in particular that interests me is “Marketing Automation”. Marketing Automation covers a huge swath of topics and since I am not an expert at the, I won’t attempt to explain them.

[...] Because I am interested in Marketing Automation and want to start applying the techniques in the projects I run. I started looking around for vendors who could provide these services. What I found is that most SaaS vendors assume that everybody who wants to use their software has deep pockets.

Without these "deep pockets" (pricey services) at his disposal, Cal looked for other options and found the self-hosted Mautic instead. He starts with a definition of his requirements including that it should be Open Source, that it should integrate with WordPress and he can contribute back to the project. He ends the post by outlining his planned platform using Mautic, WordPress, Mailgun, Mailchimp and Ditigal Ocean.

Raphael Stolt has a new post to his site for the PHP on Windows users out there helping you to keep your integration tests green when little things (like line ending differences) can cause issues between the Windows and unix-based platforms.

Lately on a Windows system, some failing integration tests for CLI commands utilising the Symfony Console component caused me some blip headaches by PHPUnit insisting that two strings are not identical due to different line endings. The following post documents the small steps I took to overcome these headaches.

He starts with the error message that the failing test was giving, a slightly unhelpful response with the "actual" and "expected" values looking basically the same. He suspected it to be something different with the encoding or line endings (a common issue between Windows and Linux platforms). To confirm his suspicions he looked deeper into the Symfony Console code and, on locating the difference, extended the "CommandTester" class to automatically disable the "decorated" setting across all tests.

With the recent release of PHP 7.1 you might be asking how you can quickly and easily update your current installation, regardless of the platform. Thankfully Colin O'Dell is here to help with this guide to upgrading to v7.1 on multiple Linux distributions, OSX and Windows.

PHP 7.1 has been released, bringing some great new features and enhancements to the language such as nullable types, the iterable pseudo-type, catching multiple exceptions, and much more.

Here's a brief guide on how to install PHP 7.1 on several different operating systems.

He includes instructions for Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS/RHEL, Mac OS 10.6+ and Windows. Complete commands and links to the downloads are also provided. You have no excuse now not to upgrade - get downloading!

A highly anticipated project in the Laravel community - Laravel Spark - has officially launched its site providing more information about the product and its upcoming release. Laravel News gives its own brief summary of Spark in a new post:

Spark is a complete scaffolding for building a SaaS app including authentication, password reset, billing plans, payment method updates, invoices, coupons, user impersonation, and more with support for Stripe and Braintree.

The official release date is April 19th, next Tuesday, and although no pricing is on the site the rumor is it’ll be less than $100. This will save you many hours from building it all yourself.

For those interested in finding out a bit more in-depth about the product, check out this recently released screencast over on the Laracasts site where Taylor Otwell shows the basic setup and features of the platform.

On the Liip blog there's a post about the release of Magento 2, the latest and hugely reworked version of the popular eCommerce platform. The post walks you through the installation of this latest update using a pre-configured Vagrant machine.

I’ve downloaded my M2 sample from the official Magento website, there I also found an archive with sample data. For a setup I used a pre-configured Vagrant machine according to the installation guide for Magento server. This installation guide offers two options: easy and advanced. Let’s try the easy way first ;) M2 has an installation wizard, so it is supposed that even a none technically prepared user can install it successfully. And indeed, it looks easy.

He walks through some of the issues he had importing the data during the installation, ultimately, falling back to a command line call to push the large sample data into the platform.

You can find out more about this release and get the latest version over on the Magento website with plenty of information about what's been improved, added and how to get started using this latest version.