On the Zend blog they've posted a retrospective of 2016 and some of their most popular articles published over the last year.

The audience has spoken. From Zend Framework 3 release to Zend Server with PHP 7, from IBM i to AWS, the top ten articles on the blog from 2016 cover a wide range of topics to help you deliver PHP applications rapidly, reliably, securely, both on-premise and in the cloud.

Articles that made the list include:

• 10 ways Zend Server boosts performance
• AWS 101 for PHP developers
• Zend Framework 3 release
• PHP 7 is gaining momentum

Check out the original post for the full list. Predictably, most are related to Zend's own offerings but its good to see some other topics mixed in there as well.

Jason McCreary, the developer behind the Laravel Shift upgrade service, has posted a retrospective of his work on the project and some of the things he's learned along the way. The service just recently topped 1000 applications upgraded.

Less than a year ago I created Laravel Shift. While not my first product, it is my first software as a service (SaaS). If you’re not familiar with Laravel Shift or interested in the backstory check out the Q&A on Laravel News or listen to the interview on Full Stack Radio.

In this post, I want to focus more on reaching the milestone of 1,000 Laravel applications upgraded. This may not sound like many, however for my first SaaS product it marks the achievement of my stretch goal. So allow me to share the most important decision, biggest challenge, and what the future holds for Laravel Shift.

He starts with a section talking about the difference between a "project" and a "product" targeted at developers who, usually, have more than one project going at a time. He talks about his decision to move Shift to a "product" and some of the hurdles he hit because of being "a developer, not a marketer". He finishes the post looking ahead to things coming with the service and the announcement of "human services" being offered to get a live person involved in the upgrade of your Laravel application.

Johannes Schlüter has a new post on his site today saying "so long and thanks for all the fish" to the PHP 5.3.x series of releases. With PHP 5.3.29 being released yesterday, that marks the end of the release cycle for the 5.3 series. He takes a bit to look back and reflect on how far things have come during the 5.3.x series, its history and his role as the release master.

PHP 5.3's history starts somewhere in 2005. We knew what a pressure point of PHP was - a language made for solving The Web Problem needs a good Unicode story. [...] As this was a big and pressing issue and the need was obvious and the solution looked promising it was quickly areed on making that the base for a future PHP 6. And then time passed, initial enthusiasm passed and the sheer amount of work became obvious. Two years in we noticed that the ongoing PHP 6 work blocked other work - new features couldn't be added to 5.2, the current version at that time, and adding them to (at that time) CVS's HEAD.

He talks about Lukas Smith getting involved as the "co-release manager" for the series and the contribution he made to the project. He mentions the over five thousand commits and around eighty people that contributed to the releases and the over ten thousand files that were changed. Major features were introduced during this series including namespacing, anonymous functions, goto and late static binding. He also talks more meta about the process the PHP development follows and how things changed over the 29 bugfix releases in the 5.3.x series.

Thank you Johannes and Lukas for all that you've done to get PHP 5.3 to where it is today and your work ensuring the introduction of these major features made it out in a timely manner.

On the Engine Yard blog Davey Shafik has a new post celebrating ten years of PHP 5 as of July 13th, 2014:

Ten years ago yesterday on July 13th 2004, PHP 5.0.0 was unleashed onto the world. Bringing with it the Zend Engine 2, effectively a brand new PHP. [...] The truth is that until PHP 5, PHP was a mostly procedural language, while it supported classes and objects, they were a bolt-on feature. This history is still visible in the majority of its default feature set even today — including some of its newest additions like the new password hashing API.

He talks about the evolution of PHP even since version 5.0.0 and how other technologies, like Ruby on Rails, has influenced the language and its developers towards greater things. He shares his answers to a few questions including:

What is the most significant change to PHP in the last 10 years?
• What's the biggest change in the community in the last 10 years?
• What's the most pressing issue for PHP?
• What would you like to see in the next major version?

He also includes an infographic of the timeline that lead up to the PHP 5.0.0 release and the advancements since then. There's even a look at the "Future of PHP" with some emerging technologies and what might lie in store for "PHP 6" (whatever that may end up being).

On the Inviqa Tech Blog Ben Longden has posted a Year in Review of PHP and the community, including some of the major trends that came into their own last year (2012).

Another year has passed, and yet again we find ourselves reflecting on what has happened in the world of PHP over the past year. Let's take a moment to look back over our 2012 predictions and see how close we were!

Trends and technologies mentioned in the retrospective include:

• Framework Convergence
• Serious Caching
• Composer
• Best Practices
• PHP Closures

Their "look ahead" predictions to what's coming in 2013 include things like an emphasis on content as a service, improvements to dependency injection containers and a push for BDD testing with PHPSpec and Behat.

On the Ibuildings techPortal blog today Ed van Beinum has posted a summary of the first day of this year's Dutch PHP Conference including some of his experiences and mentions of the sessions he attended.

He talks about the keynote from Aral Balkan (a clear favorite among the attendees) and some of the choices he had to make for sessions. He ended up attending a talk on Solr, Zend Framework on the command line, automated deployment, CouchDb applications and the Zend Framework 2.

Keep an eye out for more to come - the event was three days! You can find other summaries and retrospectives on the rest of the techPortal.

On the Ibuildings techPortal site there's a retrospective of the Dutch PHP Conference from this year, 2011.

Before our memories get swamped by our daily lives, let’s take a look back at the Dutch PHP Conference 2011. For me, two things stand out when I look back on this years DPC. One was the rate at which ideas were exchanged, both during the regular conference days and at the associated social events. [...] The other thing to stand out was the fact that many talks were not about PHP.

He goes on to talk about the ratios of PHP to non-PHP talks (only 37% were PHP-specific!) and breaks down the non-PHP talks into a few different categories including architecture, tooling, front end development and general framework updates. He also compares this to the PHP talks and came out with some interesting results.

For today’s PHP development teams, generic software engineering principles and technologies allied to PHP have become part of their architectures and daily work routine. It is only logical that we want to know more about them and learn about new ones. It is no surprise then, that we see schedules at PHP conferences which include a good proportion of talks that are not directly about PHP itself.

In this new post for his blog Brandon Savage takes a look back at his past year with a technology that, back then, was new to him - the Zend Framework.

About a year ago, I was introduced to Zend Framework as the framework I was going to be working with almost every day. And for nearly a year now, every day I have worked closely with Zend Framework, learning it’s intricacies and dealing with its warts. [...] A year after adopting it seemed like a good time to reevaluate the framework and reflect. Learning Zend Framework was a daunting, challenging experience that tested myself and those I worked with. I learned a few lessons that I think are important, and I think are worth sharing.

The post talks about the learning process he went through ("learning new tools is not easy. the tool you pick doesn't change that) and some recommendations for those wanting to learn a new technology - not just the Zend Framework: dive in without hesitation and don't doubt your decision until you really get a feel for the technology.

On the Ibuildings blog today Barney Hanlon takes a look at 2010 and some of the major happenings in the world of PHP.

Every year, for the past three years, Ibuildings has written a retrospective of the past twelve months in PHP. Looking back at last year's post, it amazes me how quickly what we were talking about is now passe. Was it only 2009 that Twitter became mainstream? Though not a heavy contributor to the 140-character medium, I find it one of the best ways to keep track of what's going on in the community. Did we only really have the last twelve months to enjoy Google Chrome? It seems to have been my choice of browser for far longer.

Some of the events mentioned included the updates that came with PHP 5.3, the end of life on PHP 5.2, the continued involvement of Microsoft in the PHP community and a trend towards more agile development of PHP projects.

With companies looking for further cost reductions and clever new ways of doing things, open source is often a viable option to help meet these goals. Our job, as the community, is to make sure PHP can meet the complex demands of its users.

It's 2009 and several in the PHP community have already started posting their own looks back at last year - here's the list so far:

• Jani Hartikainen: Best of 2008
• Sara Golemon: 2008 Lookback
• Ivo Jansch: Goodbye 2008!
• Stefan Koopmanschap: A look back
• Web Builder Zone: A Year In Retrospect - Web Builder Zone's Top 10 For 2008
• Matthew Weier O'Phinney: 2008: The year in review
• Zend Developer Zone: Year-End Conference Round-Up
• Rob Allen: 2008 end-of-year wrap-up
• Matthew Turland: Another Year, Another Summary
• Travis Swicegood: 2008: a retrospective
• Andi Gutmans: Happy New Year!
• Michelangelo van Dam: Looking back to 2008
• Keith Casey: 2008 Year End Summary
• Chuck Burgess: Looking Back...2008

Keep checking back for more great posts as they're added! Have a post you want on the list? let us know!