The Laravel News site has posted an announcement about the latest in their series of Laracon events: Laracon Online 2019.

Laracon Online 2019 is coming to a couch near you on March 6th, 2019! Back and better than ever in this 2019 edition, you will hear from the likes of Laravel creator Taylor Otwell, Tighten Partner and Laracon US speaker Matt Stauffer, Refactoring UI tag-team Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger, Laracon US speakers Freek Van Der Herten and Samantha Geitz, and Laracon 2018 EU speaker Marcel Pociot.

Just like last year, the event is hosted entirely online and the event is super affordable for the early bird price of $12. No hotels, no airfare, just signup and spend the day watching some of the best speakers right from your computer.

And there's good news for those out there wanting to attend the event - they're giving away 355 tickets for free based on the generous donations from several sponsors. Naturally, if you can afford the $12 (that's like 2 cups of fancy coffee!) then don't enter the drawing. They want as many people as possible to enjoy the event. If you're interested in the kind of content presented at these events, check out last year's talks or just head over and get your ticket now.

On the Pineco.de site they've posted a tutorial for the Laravel users out there showing how to use the framework's "signed URL" functionality to create invite links for your application.

We can handle user invitations easily with the old and good database way. We create an invitation, store it with a unique token, then email it to the user. If the user uses the link, we can delete it from the database and that’s all. Now let’s give a try to Laravel’s signed URLs to handle a database-less solution.

The article starts by explaining what the "signed route" functionality is and how to generate then using the URL helper. It also shows how to use the "signed" middleware to validate the signature provided on the request. Finally, it shows how to configure, send and use the hashes to handle user registration.

On the Laravel News site they've posted a reminder about the Early Bird registration deadline for the 2018 edition of the Laracon Online conference.

As the year comes to a close, remember that for the next 23 days, you can still buy tickets to Laracon Online 2018 for $12 (regularly $25). Tickets will go up to $25 on January 3rd, which is still a great deal for the all-star speaker lineup planned. Grab tickets today before the busy rush of the holiday and new year.

Tickets are only $12 USD at the Early Bird pricing and the conference will be happening February 7th, 2018 beginning at 10am. Speakers include several of the Laravel regulars like Adam Wathan, Chris Fado, Matt Stauffer and, of course, Taylor Otwell. You can find out more information about the conference and pick up tickets of your own at the Early Bird price (while it lasts) on the Laracon Online website.

The Laravel News site has a quick new post about some routing improvements that are coming in the next larger release of the framework , Laravel v5.4:

As Laravel 5.4 development continues, two new improvements are coming to your routes, better route caching for large applications and fluently registering routes.

The route caching updates will help performance with larger applications, reducing the parsing time required to locate and push a request to the right location. The "fluent" route improvements basically allow for the definition of some things, like middleware or route names, as a part of the route definition rather than after the fact. Examples of this are included in the post.

The Cloudways blog has a tutorial posted helping you add CAPTCHA functionality of your Symfony 3 form handling. In this case they're adding the Google reCAPTCHA handling to a registration form for users of your system.

Websites use different techniques and methods to validate contact, login and user registration forms. Some opt for custom validation methods while a large majority deploy third-party validation techniques.

Google provides a well known and proven validation tool known as reCAPTCHA. In this tutorial, I will demonstrate how to add Google reCAPTCHA to a Symfony 3 registration form. Hence, if you’re looking for a Recaptcha Symfony union, you’ve got it!

They start by helping you set up a Cloudways PHP application and install the latest version of the Symfony 3 framework on it as a sample application. They then walk you through the steps required to create a reCAPTCHA application and hooking it into your Cloudways server's hostname. With that set up they move over into the Symfony application, generating the User entity via Doctrine and creating the matching view/controller to handle the reCAPTCHA output. The registration form is then created and the handling is added to verify the CAPTCHA value submitted against the Google servers.

The SitePoint PHP blog has kicked off a new series of posts today with part one of a set of tutorials showing you how to create a registration and invitation system with Symfony2. While they've talked about general Symfony2 development before, this series will focus more on the security side, on authentication and authorization.

In this article series of two parts, we are going to talk about a very important area of web application development: Authentication and Authorization. Symfony2 has a very detailed elaboration of these two topics in its official documentation. Anyone who is seriously looking into this is encouraged to read through that official document after absorbing the essentials from this tutorial.

The author starts with a brief list of common user management tasks including registration via a form, sending confirmation emails and verifying the user's login. He helps you create the underlying "user" table (complete with the SQL) and talks a bit about the contents of a few of the columns. He includes the settings you'll need to put into your "security.yml" configuration file and a bit of detail on what each section and its settings mean. He then moves on to the "User" entity and class file, adding some functionality to the standard generated class. He also includes the code needed to create the invite and registration actions.

NetTuts.com has posted the next part in their "Programming with Yii2" series today with this tutorial showing you how to integrate user registration into your sample application.

This is part four of a series on Yii2. In Programming With Yii2: Getting Started, we set up Yii2 locally, built a Hello World application, set up a remote server, and used Github to deploy our code. In part two, we learned about Yii's implementation of its Model View Controller architecture and how to build web pages and forms that collect and validate data. In part three, we learned about working with databases and ActiveRecord. In this tutorial, we'll walk you through integrating a popular user registration plugin.

They walk you through the use of the Yii2-User extension to provide the user handling functionality. The tutorial shows you how to get it installed (via Composer), run its database migrations to create the needed tables and where to update the configuration files to pull the plugin into the execution. They also help you set up SwiftMailer (what it uses to send its emails) and then gets into the integration of the registration with the application with a signup page.

On NetTuts.com today there's a new tutorial posted showing you how to create user authentication with a Laravel framework-based application. Their example comes complete with registration and login code and the markup for the pages.

Authentication is required for virtually any type of web application. In this tutorial, I’d like to show you how you can go about creating a small authentication application using Laravel 4. We’ll start from the very beginning by creating our Laravel app using composer, creating the database, loading in the Twitter Bootstrap, creating a main layout, registering users, logging in and out, and protecting routes using filters.

They walk you through every step of the way - providing the PHP and HTML (and a bit of CSS) needed to make the system:

• Creating a new project and installing dependencies
• Connecting to the database and making the "Users" table
• Making the registration page (with controller and view)
• Handling the form submission from the page
• Making a basic login page
• Adding the "log out" functionality as well

You can also just hop over to Github and grab the full example if you'd like to see how it all fits together.

The Lone Star PHP Conference (happening in June in Dallas, Tx) has officially announced their schedule and the sale of Early Bird tickets for this year's event!

The Call for Papers has been wrapped up, the speakers have been selected and we're happy to announce that the schedule for this year's event has been posted!

Topics for this year's event include: Building testable applications, PHP extensions, Database testing, ElasticSearch, Mentoring developers, RESTful APIs. If you want to get in on the Early Bird pricing ($150 USD for the two-day event), hurry and get them before the April 15th deadline!

According to this press release from Zend, the registration for this year's Zend PHP Conference has officially opened and speaker submissions were up four-hundred percent from previous years.

Zend anticipates its biggest ever conference due to growing interest in the practical use of PHP to develop cloud applications, which is reflected in the 400 percent increase in cloud-related submissions to this year’s Call for Papers. Strong interest in enterprise mobility, web automation and PHP advances are also reflected in this year’s content. ZendCon 2011 will offer keynotes by industry and enterprise IT leaders, in-depth technical sessions and tutorials, technology previews, vendor exhibits and networking opportunities. The event targets professional developers, IT/development managers, system administrators and business managers interested in PHP technologies and solutions for web, mobile and cloud.

The point out a few highlights of this year's even including topics like cloud infrastructure, RIAs, mobile devices, application architecture and best practices. There'll also be a preview of what's coming in Zend Framework 2.0 as related to its cloud integration functionality. You can learn more about the conference and get your tickets at ZendCon.com.