On the Symfony blog they've posted the second part of their announcement about the speakers that will be presenting at the SymfonyCon Lisbon conference in December.

We announced last Monday the first part of the conference schedule for SymfonyCon Lisbon 2018. We’re now very happy to announce the second part of the schedule. Discover the conference schedule! We’re extremely pleased to welcome the following speakers (in alphabetical order) and their talks at the conference.

Speakers and sessions in this announcement include:

• Pedro Magalhães: "Changing PHP"
• Jeremy Mikola: "Bulletproof MongoDB"
• Michelle Sanver: "Using the Workflow component for e-commerce"
• Miro Svrtan: "When Testing Makes No Sense"

They'll also be joined by Symfony creator and project lead Fabien Potencier with an opening keynote.

On the Symfony blog they've posted an announcement about the release of the schedule for Symfony Loves PHP USA 2018, an event replacing SymfonyLive USA happening October 11th and 12th in San Francisco.

We’re super thrilled to announce that SymfonyLive USA becomes now Symfony Loves PHP USA conference!

Welcome to Symfony Loves PHP USA, the only conference dedicated to Symfony and PHP in the USA. We decided to change the conference name and its purpose to create a unique place in the USA where you can hear all the latest and best developments with Symfony and PHP! We aim to gather the American Symfony and PHP communities in San Francisco from October 11th to October 12th. We want you to come and feel welcome regardless your level of development with Symfony or PHP (beginner, advanced, intermediate).

Speakers at this year's event include:

• Jordi Boggiano
• Kristen Costagliola
• Cal Evans
• Jeremy Mikola
• Dave Stokes
• Jonathan Wage

...and many more. Topics range from "soft skills" like general career advice out to more technical topics like single page applications and Doctrine+Symfony. You can find out more about the schedule and the conference on the event's main page and even order your tickets for this great event!

On Pineco.de they've posted a new tutorial showing you how to create a MySQL database backup system using Laravel and a command-line call to mysqldump wrapped in an Artisan command.

A few days ago, I signed in to the wrong database and deleted around 18 000 records that were in use. Not to mention, we had no backup for that data. So after all, I decided to make a little script to dump the database and save it to an SQL file automatically.

But, if you are here for a fully working backup system, you should take a look at <a href="https://github.com/spatie/laravel-backup>this package. We won’t cover more just scheduling database exports and its scheduling.

The post starts with the command that will be executed on the command-line and the code required to "warm up" the console and run the command. He shares the code for this command and walks through it, explaining each part. Next comes the scheduling of the task and, as a bonus, setting up the scheduler to run on the Forge service.

On the Laravel News site there's a new post looking at the use of user-defined schedules and some of the "hidden" features the Laravel framework provides to allow for even more customization.

Recently Adam Wathan and Taylor Otwell have used Basecamp to track what they are doing every day–a tech diary. Notably, they are using the check-in feature which allows you to schedule questions to be sent to members about almost anything. Taylor and Adam are using it for “What did you work on today?”

It’s not that it’s the same time of day or even that it’s only weekdays which peaked my curiosity but the fact every check-in has a custom schedule defined by a user. In Laravel, we can quickly schedule a job to run every weekday at 4 pm, and we can use a custom timezone. But out of the box, we cannot set a different schedule for every individual check-in. We would have to store a cron expression and manually check every minute if it’s due.

After some "source code diving" the author figured out that the Schedulable trait allows you to define a more customized version of a schedule to fit your needs, making it simple to implement in any class or model. Code examples of these changes are included in the post as well as some next steps to have it implemented more widely either in the Laravel core or a package.

The php[tek] conference, from the folks behind php[architect] magazine, has officially posted the schedule for their 2018 event happening in late May.

Sessions at this year's event include:

• "Evolution of PHP Security" by Eric Mann
• "Mastering REST API Tests with Codeception" by Michael Bodnarchuk
• "PHP on Kubernetes" by Chris Church
• "Building Facal Recognition Services with Javascript and AWS" by Kesha Williams
• "Greener Pastures: Infrastructure from the Group Up" by Steve Grunwell
• "As Easy as Falling Off a Log (or Writing One)" by Brent Laminack

There's tons more this year's conference has to offer, so be sure to check out this full schedule and find those topics that interest you. You can still pick up Early Bird tickets (for just the conference or the conference+training) until the end of February so be sure to get yours while you can!

On the TutsPlus.com site there's a new tutorial posted introducing you to task scheduling in Laravel, a feature that allows you to run code in the application periodically similar to a cron job.

In this article, we’ll go through one of the exciting features of the Laravel web framework—task scheduling. Throughout the course of this article, we’ll look at how Laravel allows you to manage scheduled tasks in your application. Moreover, we’ll also end up creating our own custom scheduled tasks for demonstration purposes.

The Laravel framework allows you to set up scheduled tasks so that you don't have to worry about setting them up at the system level. You can get rid of that complex cron syntax while setting up scheduled tasks since Laravel allows you to define them in a user-friendly way.

The article starts with a brief introduction to cron jobs, how they're set up and some issues that come along with them. Next the article describes the "Laravel Way" of handling task scheduling, showing how to use Laravel's artisan command to run the scheduler. With the basics laid out, the author then walks through how to create a custom task either using a closure/callable, making an artisan command or using the exec command. Code examples are included for each and more information about scheduling options and functionality can be found in the Laravel manual.

On the Unnikked.ga site there's a tutorial posted by Nicola Malizia showing you how to schedule user-generated cron jobs in Laravel using the built-in job handling functionality.

While developing a personal project I was in the need to let user defines actions that run periodically.

My first thought was to use the Task Scheduling component of Laravel. The solution that I came up with is quite simple, yet effective.

He then walks through the process of setting up a "tasks" table where users can define their jobs and how to pull and execute them as a part of the Kernel.php configuration. He ends the post asking readers if there's another way they might go about this and still allow users to define their own jobs without having to write the code for each type.

On the TutsPlus.com site they've posted the latest tutorial of their "Building Your Startup" series. In this latest article author Jeff Reifman focuses on adding routes and handling for the "schedule with me" functionality.

For a long time since I began this project, I've wanted Meeting Planner and Simple Planner to have a publicly accessible page you can share with people to schedule a meeting with you. In other words, "Sure, let's meet, just visit my schedule with me page at Meeting Planner, I'm Bernie Sanders (no space)."

In today's tutorial, I'll show you I've done it using Yii's routing and some of the related issues that came up.

He starts with a screencast of the feature (the end result) showing how the UI functions and what features it includes. He then takes a step back and starts on the development process beginning with the planning quickly followed by the code. He shows the creation of the initial view, making the routing changes and how to handle signup and login for the "Schedule With Me" page.

The php[architect] site has released the official announcement of the php[tek] 2017 conference schedule being released:

Our conference chairs announced the lineup of speakers and talks for php[tek] 2017. It’s a great lineup, and you don’t have to just take our word for it. It’s shaping up to be a conference you don’t want to miss which takes place over 5 days May in Atlanta. Head over to the php[tek] site to see the schedule and register.

They've also included a list of just a few of the talks that will be presented at this year's event including:

• Demystifying Object-Oriented Programming with Alena Holligan
• *MySQL-Awesome Features You’re Probably Missing8 with Liam Wiltshire
• Learning About Machine Learning with Joel Lord

You can view the full schedule for the conference, happening May 24th through 28th in Atlanta, Georgia, on the main conference site and pick up your tickets too.

On the Zend Developer Zone there's a new post talking about scheduling in applications ("scheduling elePHPants") including both library recommendations and advice about code reuse.

It was while I was creating the 100th or so cronjob to do some very similar to the other 99 that I thought, “Hey! Why not just put all this in a database and check it once a minute instead?” [...] It would be so much easier to deal with in PHP. Also, cron does not scale well at all either in performance or management.

The problem is that cron is an elegant solution for “Do this at that time” type of problems. Every solution I came up with was basically re-creating cron. That in itself isn’t a bad thing, but the logic involved in doing what cron does is mind-melting.

[...] Then it hit me, I am probably not the first person that has had this need. There have probably been other people who needed to implement “Do this at that time” within a PHP application. So I started looking around. What I found was encouraging.

The author then mentions several packages that he went through searching for the right solution to his problem, noting that while Laravel-based solutions seemed nice, they wouldn't work with his framework choice (Slim). He decided on the cron-expression package, finding it to be the best fit for the project's needs.

I had spent countless hours trying to create the solution myself. [...] I got so lost in solving the problem, I forgot to look to see if someone had already solved it. [...] After I finally came to my senses, I tweeted that out to remind myself to “Use the Source”.