php[architect] magazine has released their latest issue for November 2018: Generics and Project Success. In this issue they feature articles like:

• "The Case for Generics in PHP" by Chris Holland
• "Maintaining Laravel Applications" by Jason McCreary
• "Getting Started With Php? Let’s Start the Right Way!" by Junior Grossi
• "How to Knock Down Any Project in Ten Steps" by Pawe? Lewtak

The usual columns are all returning including Joe Ferguson continuing his series on creating packages, Eric Mann covering five security risks to look for in a code review, and James Titcumb with some resources you can use to continue "leveling up" in your development career.

If you want to "try before you buy", they're also offering a free article, "The Case for Generics in PHP" by Chris Holland. You can pick up a copy of your own directly from the php[architect] site or subscribe to their print or PDF versions!

php[architect] magazine has posted about the release of their first issue for 2018 - "Setting Up to Succeed" for January.

Setting Up to Succeed includes articles on:

• Background Processing & Concurrency With PHP by Matthew Schwartz
• Securing Your Site in Development and Beyond by Michael Akopov
• Don’t Wait; Generate! by Ian Littman
• PHP Sessions in Depth by Jeremy Dorn

  Joe Ferguson’s looks at Laravel’s Collection class in Artisanal: Using Data Collections. If you’re looking to hire this year, read The Dev Lead Trenches: Finding Someone New by Chris Tankersley. In Education Station, Edward Barnard takes over and looks at What is a Real Programmer? James Titcumb says Thank You, OSS Maintainers in Community Corner. Eric Mann explains why logging is an OWASP Top Ten 2017 ASR in Security Corner: Updates to the OWASP Top Ten—Logging. To start 2018, Eli shares his New Year’s Resolutions in finally{}.

As with all previous issues, if you'd like to "try before you buy" they've offered a free sample article, the tutorial from Jeremy Dorn covering PHP sessions in depth. You can pick up a copy of this issue for your own on the php[architect] site or subscribe for a full year of PHP goodness with either a digital or print subscription.

The Loosely Coupled podcast has posted the eighth episode of their podcast (hosted by PHP community members Jeff Carouth and Matt Frost) asking "Do you even polyglot?"

In this episode Jeff and Matt talk about the idea of polyglotism, the benefits, practical advice about choosing which languages to learn and how to be successful while learning new languages. You should go out and find a new language and prepare to give it the time it deserves. It’s best to find a mentor or someone to help you and step out of your language or paradigm comfort zone.

They mention several other topics including Clojure, the splat operator and fellow community members Joel Clermont and Igor Wiedler. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

Brandon Savage continues his look at using RabbitMQ and PHP together to queue up requests today in this latest post. In this new part of the series, he focuses on the last piece of the puzzle - consuming the requests in the queue. (Parts one and two)

Once you’ve created a RabbitMQ producer, it’s fairly easy to create a consumer. In fact, the only difference is in exactly what commands you’re using. The connection, envelope, channel and queue declarations are the same. While in RabbitMQ you publish to the exchange, you actually do consume a specific queue. As a result, the commands for consuming are part of the AMQPQueue class.

He shows you how to set up the code to sit in the background and wait for a queue request and how to fetch them in a non-blocking way. He finishes off the post with a look at handling success and error conditions (based on the status of message consumption, not the result of the processing).

Matthew Setter has a new article on his MaltBlue site today that suggests that one of the reasons a project is successful is because of effective testing.

Like many of us, despite being told repeatedly how great testing is, the benefits it will bring, the time it will save and how it will improve the quality of my applications, I too considered testing a second-thought. I saw it as something which was both expensive and time-consuming. If I was genuine with you, I’d say I believed it be be nothing more than a “nice to have”, after the application was written. If you also feel (or have felt) this way – know that you’re not alone.

He realized, though, that the usual false assumptions about testing were just that and starteed getting into testing, TDD and BDD on recent projects. He talks some about some general thoughts around testing like "testing can't be an after-thought" and the fact that it's no always easy. He includes a way of thinking about testing in your application and the confidence good, solid tests can bring.

On the TechRadar site, there's a new article posted with an interview with Rasmus Lerdorf about how and why PHP has become such a huge success in the online development world.

Rasmus Lerdorf is undoubtedly the most famous Greenlandic geek alive. [...] Linux Format magazine caught up with him to find out more about his position in the PHP camp today and the decisions he made early on that made the project a whopping success.

Topics mentioned in the interview include his current involvement in the project, his role in any "final decisions" about the language and its future, what languages inspired him and his opinions on a few others that occupy some of the same space as PHP.

On the Debuggable blog, Felix Geisendorfer has posted some code (thought up by Marc Grabaniski) to go through Google and find the pages that they have indexed for your site. Their goal is to check and see if the migration of a site was successful.

Just get a list of all pages google has indexed from your site and then use that as your basis for checking if your migration worked or not. This is very convenient because you do not have to know all your own urls yourself, and you'll only get the relevant ones (if they are not in google they are unlikely to have traffic).

The code is included as well as an example usage. He also points out FixtureShell for more command-line CakePHP examples.

Eirik Hoem has posted a new look at a function that can be amazingly helpful when you have a script with issues that needs a little extra help cleaning up after itself - register_shutdown_function.

Scripts tend to die, and that's not usually nice. We do not want to show the user a fatal error nor a blank page (display errors off) . PHP has a function called register_shutdown_function which lets us set up a function which is called at execution shutdown. What this means is that our function will be executed when our script is done executing / dying and PHP execution is about to shut down.

He suggests various things that can be done with the functionality, including checking for successful script execution (via a false variable that can be checked for success).

The highly controversial GoPHP5 project has come to his finishing mark (actually February 5th) and has been claimed a success by Robert Douglass, one of the creators of the project:

Congratulations are in order. Since the launch of GoPHP5.org, over 100 software projects and over 200 web hosts have come on board to support the adoption of PHP 5.2. As opposed to just a few months ago, it is now easy to find a hosting solution that supports PHP 5, and software developers can turn to the attractive new features that PHP 5 offers without the need to worry that they are leaving their end users without options.

He gives credits to Larry Garfield and Marc Delisle for their hard work towards making the project a success and notes that the project can stand as a successful effort that the community pulled together on to make development and the platforms we build on that much better. Be sure and check out the long list of projects and hosting companies that made the move to PHP5.

Ben Ramsey says congratulations to the Costa Rica PHP group on having their first meeting with 37 developers in attendance.

It sounds like they have a very active and vibrant PHP developer community in Costa Rica, and they've found two very supportive universities that have offered to host their meetings and events. I wish that every PHP user group could find sponsors willing to provide computer labs and even bring in outside speakers!

According to the Costa Rica PHP website they had a wonderful response from local developers and found them all eager to contribute however they could. They even have the support of two local universities where they can meet/do work in their labs (even bring in speakers from other countries).