The Three Devs and a Maybe podcast has released their latest episode (#97) where hosts Michael Budd, Fraser Hart, Lewis Cains and Edd Mann are joined by internals developer Joe Watkins to talk about PHP RFCs targeted for PHP 7.1.

In this episode we are joined by Joe Watkins to discuss the many RFC’s that are in contention to be approved for PHP 7.1. We start off with a congratulations to Joe for his first PHP Release Manager position, highlighting what the role entails and how it is going. We then discuss the RFC process and how there has been a lot of activity over the past couple of weeks within this space.

The concept of ‘Null’ is the first group of RFC’s we discuss, followed by union/intersection types and the pipe operator. We then move on to chat about short closure syntax, functional interfaces and lexical scope within anonymous classes. Finally, we bring up the comparable RFC which has been around for many years and the benefits of having attributes within the language.

In the show notes they have links to all of the RFCs mentioned in the episode (there's lots of them) for your easy reference. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed too.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today Bruno Skvorc has written up the first part of his look at installing Ghost with Nginx and Phalcon on his hosting provider. This is the first post in his "showdown" series of trials on various CMS systems.

You might be wondering why I’m writing about Ghost on a PHP oriented channel – this series will be a showdown of all the various PHP based CMS’ I can find, benchmarked against each other and against Ghost, as I look for the next best alternative. Since my DigitalOcean droplet already runs Nginx as a reverse proxy for the blog, I’ll also be deploying all the CMS’ on that same installation, each on its own subdomain.

He walks you through the whole process from start to finish:

• Installing PHP on Nginx
• Setting up a virtual host on a subdomain
• Installing Phalcon

Simon Holywell has posted what he calls a "showdown" between HHVM, Zephir and PHP comparing various benchmarks (based on a Mandelbrot Set fractal).

Since its inception the slow running speed of PHP has been widely publicised and over the years there have been a number of improvements. [...] It has become more interesting recently however with three projects looking for improvements in different ways. The core has adopted the Zend OPcache for future versions of PHP, Facebook has been working on a just in time compiler called HipHop VM and the team that brought us Phalcon framework have created Zephir.

All of these projects have chosen to tackle the issue of PHP's speed via different avenues. It has therefore left one simple question - who's making the biggest improvements? Who's the fastest?

He briefly introduces the "contenders" for those not familiar with them and gets right into the benchmarking process. He shares the link to the tests he used and a few notes about the HHVM setup that could account for lower numbers. He shares his results in a few graphs or you can grab the CSV data yourself and parse it. The entire setup is also over on GitHub if you'd like to just check that out.

On the O'Reilly OnLamp.com website today, there's a new article that compares searching methods on a site - a "search engine showdown".

It's a universal frustration. You just know that the piece of information you're looking for is somewhere on a site. You click one link, then another, and another. You go back to the home page and try a different branch of the site. After dozens of clicks, you still can't find the information you need. Then it's back to Google and on to another site. At last you find one with an internal search engine. You enter your search term, and voilá!--the information you need pops up in less than a second.

They compare these two types - hosted versus local - and show how to get started on integrating one, the local option, into your site. They start with a few things consider before getting into the choices - the physical issues involved, the page information itself, and how the engine will index.

The rest of the article is devoted to the different options they'd recommend along with ratings, what technology they use, if they're PHP5 compatible, difficulty of installation, and many more criteria. Their list of leading local search engines for your site are:

• Sphider
• MnogoSearch
• TSEP
• PHPDig
• iSearch
• RiSearch

On the O'Reilly OnLamp.com website today, there's a new article that compares searching methods on a site - a "search engine showdown".

It's a universal frustration. You just know that the piece of information you're looking for is somewhere on a site. You click one link, then another, and another. You go back to the home page and try a different branch of the site. After dozens of clicks, you still can't find the information you need. Then it's back to Google and on to another site. At last you find one with an internal search engine. You enter your search term, and voilá!--the information you need pops up in less than a second.

They compare these two types - hosted versus local - and show how to get started on integrating one, the local option, into your site. They start with a few things consider before getting into the choices - the physical issues involved, the page information itself, and how the engine will index.

The rest of the article is devoted to the different options they'd recommend along with ratings, what technology they use, if they're PHP5 compatible, difficulty of installation, and many more criteria. Their list of leading local search engines for your site are:

• Sphider
• MnogoSearch
• TSEP
• PHPDig
• iSearch
• RiSearch