On the Kinsta blog Mark Gavalda has shared their latest PHP 7 versus HHVM benchmarks now that the first official stable release of PHP 7 has been unleashed for public consumption. They opted for testing with a large variety of tools and software rather than simple benchmarking scripts to give a more "real world" look at the difference between the two.

To see how much of an improvement we can expect from this new PHP interpreter we put the public release version of PHP 7.0 to test and compared a couple of popular software suites’ performance using PHP 5.6.16, PHP 7.0 and HHVM 3.10.1 on a bare metal server (so virtualization doesn’t interfere with the results). Tested software includes WordPress 4.3.1, Drupal 8, Magento 2.0 CE, OctoberCMS build 309, PyroCMS v3 beta2, and Flarum v0.1.0-beta.4.

The basic tl;dr of the post is that HHVM still performs better for all of the software tested but PHP 7 is not too far off on some of them. They share the specifications of the machine (bare metal) they used for testing and get into the results for each of the seven pieces of software tested. Their results are in transactions per second and both graphed and numeric results are shown. Unfortunately, though, the Flarum software had to be kept on a "pending" list as it doesn't run on either PHP 7 or HHVM properly.

In a recent post Phil Sturgeon talks about the recent news from Heroku about their integrated PHP support and some of his own experience in using the new service feature and migrate his blog over.

Heroku was - as far as I remember - the first (mainstream) PaaS on the market. It was Ruby-only but it was that symbol of modern web development at the time, with the whole "slinging code", "getting shit done", make a Git repo and start shipping bro, hack project/agile-til-it-works mindset. [...] Git push your code, its deployed, one-click installs and drag to scale. It sucked that it was always for Ruby, because as I was also doing a lot of work in PHP I obviously wished I could have the same for my other projects.

He walks through some of the "evolution" of the PaaS (platform as a service) market as it related to PHP environments. He talks about other services like PHPFog, Pagodabox and Fortrabbit. The Heroku added true PHP support and he made his move. He goes through the steps he followed to get his blog migrated over and the commands needed to make the push.

On 7PHP.com Khayrattee Wassem has posted another interview with a member of the PHP community. This time it's with Phil Sturgeon, the developer behind the PyroCMS project.

In this edition I talked with Phil Sturgeon who is the founder of the CMS named as PyroCMS. He also wrote a book about it called “Catapult into PyroCMS“. @Philsturgeon is very much involved in The PHP Community; he regularly participates in conferences, is a prominent voice and voting member of The PHP-Fig (aka the PHP Framework Interop Group, I also asked him a few questions about it) and he has been amongst the core contributors of PHP Frameworks like CodeIgniter (CI) and FuelPHP, although he is now opening his arms towards Laravel PHP framework (the PHP Framework for Web Artisans). On the professional scene, he is the Lead Engineer at Kapture.

They talk some about his background, how he got involved in the PHP community and some of his thoughts about PHP's growth during that time. He includes some advice to developers just getting their start (including some good resources) and some of the tools he uses in his development. There's a bit towards the end about Phil's involvement in the PHP-FIG and some of his involvement in conferences around the world.

On NetTuts.com today there's a new tutorial posted showing you how to create a theme for PyroCMS, an open source, PHP-based content management system with a large user base and community.

Like most content management systems, PyroCMS uses front-end themes. Though PyroCMS themes are built a bit differently than what you might be used to from other systems, they’re still quite easy to create. They’re so easy, in fact, that very little PHP experience is required to assemble them!

He walks through things like the folder structure of the templates directory and how to get started on a custom "Foo" theme of your own. He covers how to lay out the HTML markup for the theme and how you can use partials for the sections of the site. He briefly touches on using multiple layout files and how to use different layouts shown only to mobile devices.

The Atlanta PHP User Group has announced their May 2012 meeting on their site today. In next month's meeting John Corry will be presenting about PyroCMS and why you should base your next site on it.

If you use (or would like to use) the CodeIgniter framework in your PHP projects, you’ve probably seen that each project requires common elements (authentication, user management, basic CMS components). Take a walkthrough of PyroCMS with John Corry to learn how you can leverage it’s components to bring your projects closer to completion right out of the box! If you love CI, you’ll LOVE PyroCMS!

The meeting will be May 3rd from 7-9pm at Strongbox West there in Atlanta. If you have a user group meeting you'd like announced, send the information on over and it'll get posted!

On AppStorm.net there's a new tutorial posted showing you how to use the PyroCMS content management system (CodeIgniter-based) to set up a simple and easy content repository.

With a really nifty content-management system called PyroCMS, this needn’t be something to worry about. In this article, I’ll be showing you how to get PyroCMS installed on a LAMP web server and the basics of creating content and working with the highly-extensible system it offers.

They start with an overview of what PyroCMS is and some of the requirements you'll need to get it up and running. They walk you through the installation process including the database, server checks and permissions needs. They also help you customize it a bit for your site and set up some basic sample content.