As is mentioned by the Laravel News site and announced on the GitHub blog, repositories that have PHP have a new feature - introspection showing what methods and functions have changed in pull requests.

The file finder makes it easy to review pull requests and understand how changes impact your code. Now PHP developers can navigate to changed methods and functions right in their pull requests, too.

Searching the file finder for the term function or the name of a changed function in a PHP file will provide you with a filtered view of the results, so you can easily identify and view the most impactful parts of a pull request. Check out the documentation to learn more.

An animation in the post shows the feature at work, making use of the "Jump to" menu to show a drop-down listing of all files changed and the methods changed inside them. These can then be used to jump to parts of the pull request (rather than having to search through the entire thing for changes).

As is mentioned in this new post to the Laravel News site, there's a handy Laravel Cheat Sheet that's been published to help keep relevant Laravel information at your fingertips.

The Laravel Cheat Sheet is a new project from the EST Group that shows you many of the Laravel features from a filterable web app. For those that have used Laravel for a few years, you may notice the similarities to Jesse O’Briens.

Jesse hasn’t had time to keep his version up to date which left an opening for this new one. However, I’m disappointed in the similarities. Even though both are open source it just feels odd to me that this one looks so much like Jesse’s.

You can view the project directly (via GitHub pages) or grab the source if you'd like to check it out.

Lorna Mitchell has shared a tip she's found helpful when using the phan static analysis tool for finding only PHP files via a simple grep.

Phan is the PHP Analyzer for PHP 7 code. I've been using it, partly out of curiosity, and partly to look at what the implications of upgrading my various projects will be. [...] I generated my filelist.txt files with a little help from grep - by looking for all files with opening PHP tags in, and putting that list of filenames into a file.

The phan tool is still pretty young but it provides a good example of how to use the new php-ast handling to parse and analyze PHP code.

On DZone.com today there's a new post from Chris Shiflett sharing some timeless advice from an older copy of a PHP Quick Reference (published in 2009) about performance and security.

While cleaning out my desk, I found an old copy of a PHP Quick Reference I helped make a few years ago. On the front page are a few performance and security tips that I thought I'd share. (Performance tips are from George Schlossnagle.)

Performance tips include profile early/profile often, cache when possible and don't over-optimize. The security hints include some of the usual suspects - trust nothing, filter input/escape output and use prepared statements.

On DZone.com today there's a new interview by Lyndsey Clevesy with Jason Gilmore looking at the Zend Framework and some of the general things to expect in coming versions.

This week's DZone Refcard is about Getting Started with the Zend Framework. The card introduces you to the basics of the Zend Framework and sets you on the path to creating your first project. I met the author, Jason Gilmore, to find out more about the topic.

They talk about some of what the framework currently has to offer developers, what kind of involvement he's had with it, who it supports as far as advanced PHP features and what's to come in version 2.0. The Zend Framework RefCard mentioned can be viewed or downloaded here - a six-page quick reference for some of the more common Zend Framework tasks.

Chris Shiflett, after finding an old reference guide, has decided to share a few helpful hints from the guide to help you in your development.

While cleaning out my desk, I found an old copy of a PHP Quick Reference I helped make a few years ago. On the front page are a few performance and security tips that I thought I'd share. (Performance tips are from George Schlossnagle.)

The tips include topics like caching, using external data sources, filtering input using prepared statements and using pre-existing solutions before just rolling your own.

Among other things mentioned in his his latest post Bill Staples talks about a new tool that makes the installation of lots of popular web apps (PHP and not) simpler - the Microsoft Web Application Installer.

The Microsoft Web Application Installer (Web AI) is a companion to Web PI, and provides a super easy way to download, install and configure many popular community and open source applications on IIS7. Available applications include DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti, osCommerce, PHPBB, and Wordpress, with more on the way.

You can find out more about this web installer and the Microsoft Platform tools from this page on Microsoft's site or in this Web AI forum (where you can also provide your own feedback).

The folks over at DZone have added to their RefCardz selection with a PHP version quick reference card.

PHP is the world's most popular server-side Web scripting language. This reference card was created to help you quickly navigate some of PHP's most commonplace features, including objectoriented programming, array and string manipulation, regular expressions, and MySQL integration.

The card (created by Jason Gilmore) is available for free download (PDF) from the DZone website.

The Zend Developer Zone has pointed out a new course that's offered by Zend to help experienced programmers further their PHP education - Zend Quick Start: PHP for Experienced Programmers.

This course covers many of the same topics as both the PHP I: Foundations and PHP II: Higher Structures classes but at an accelerated rate with special emphasis on the differences between PHP and other commonly used languages.

The next session of the course starts on April 29th and will last through May 16th. There will be nine sessions during that time for two hours at a time. You can get full details, including how to reserve your spot, on the course's page on the Zend website.

From Codewalkers.com today, there's two new tutorial-related bits of information we wanted to pass along - one's an update to a current tutorial, "Multiple Pages of Data from a Text File", and a brand new tutorial - "Quick and Dirty Ajax".

The update to the pagination tutorial includes a bit broader scope of functionality - mainly allowing for pagination from database results and how to be sure you're not dropping any additional query string variables included in the script (always a good thing).

The Ajax tutorial goes through just the basics - how to create and make the connection to a background PHP script. They also give a more "real world" example than just a "hello world", a script that can handle two types of requests, one of which is a call to a database to return results back to the script.