On the Symfony blog the project has made an announcement about a new addition to the Symfony team to help handle security issues around the framework: Michael Cullum

Handling security issues responsibly and transparently is key to the success of any Open-Source project. Symfony is no exception. We documented the process of our security management policy a long time ago.

[...] Today, I'm very happy and proud to announce that we are getting to the next level. Michael Cullum accepted to join the Symfony Core Team to lead the security team. He will be responsible for managing the security process.

Michael is the secretary of the PHP-FIG group, represents the PHPBB project and is a heavy user of the Symfony framework. Having Michael on the team means that there will be a central point of contact and someone whose primary role is ensuring the safety and security of the overall project and framework.

Freek Van der Herten has posted a guide to sending an email in a Larvel Spark-based system to remind a user that their trial of a service is expiring soon. In this case, it's a monitoring service he offers called Oh Deal.

I'm currently building a webapp named Laravel Spark, a Laravel based template to kick off SaaS projects. It offers logic for organising users into teams, handles trial periods, subscriptions, payments, invoices and much more.

[...] Unfortunately, Spark will not send out a mail to team owners whose teams are in trial periods that will soon expire. Luckily it's easy to add that yourself. I'll show you how to do just that in this post. Along the way, you'll learn some good general tips for sending out emails in batches. Let's get started!

He then starts in on the code, showing first how to locate the teams that should be sent the email. He adds a new field to track when the email was sent and the code required to send the actual email. He shows how to make the command restartable, create the "Mailable" class and the command to send the actual email.

The Delicious Brains blog has an interesting post, the second part of a series, talking about staying healthy - both mentally and physically - while working from home. In this new article several people share their own ideas, habits and experiences that have helped them keep up while being a part of a remote team.

It’s been just over a year since we posted about our struggles to stay healthy whilst working from home in a remote team. In that time we’ve had two new members join the team, one full company meetup and one regional, one new baby, two engagements and three home moves, so I thought it was about time we give an update on where we are with our health. Ian did promise an update 6 months after the last, but don’t hold it against him.

He post shares thoughts and comments from eight different people, each with their own unique experiences and recommendations (what works for some doesn't for others). Most of the suggestions include recommendations of regular exercise, making mental health a priority and better sleep habits.

The SitePoint PHP blog continues their series covering the use of the OctoberCMS product to create a custom content management system tailored to your needs. In this new part of the series they show how to build a custom plugin for team management, showing how to use models and controllers along the way.

So far, we covered different aspects of OctoberCMS. This is a follow up article to discover how to use OctoberCMS for CRUD applications and take a detailed view at how to work with models, relations and controllers. [...] We are going to build a project management plugin where you can add different users to teams and assign them to projects.

You'll need to follow the first part of the series if you want to be able to follow along. Once you have that set up they show how to use the artisan command to create the plugin scaffold code and what the resulting pluginDetails function should look like. The tutorial then shows you how to create the related database tables and how to add the "team" column to the current user table. They then get in to creating the models to work with the tables, building out the controllers and view to manage the teams and the same kinds of handling for the "projects" the teams are related to. The post ends with a look at creating lists of projects/teams, adding in filtering and working with permissions for the management of teams.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has spent the last ten years of his career working for Zend as a part of their Zend Framework team. In this post to his site he looks back over the years, how it all started and where he is today.

10 years ago, as I write this, I was on a plane from Burlington, VT, to San Jose, CA, where I'd be starting work at Zend Technologies the next day as a PHP Developer.

He talks about where he started out at Zend (the eBiz team) and the kind of work he was given. It was early on that he started working with an internal, new project at the time: Zend Framework. He looks at some of his early contributions to the project and his "trial by fire" when he was asked to help give a tutorial about it at that year's ZendCon. He also mentions some of the people he's worked with along the way and gives thanks to the founding Zend team. Zend Framework was one of the first major frameworks out there and paved the way for the framework-driven environment we find ourselves in now. With Zend Framework v2 it encouraged a component-based system that spread quickly across the entire PHP community. Thank you Matthew for all of your hard work over the years, not just in the Zend Framework ecosystem but in the PHP community as a whole.

Loïc Chardonne has kicked off a new series of posts on his site that talk about doing "Symfony Differently" and some things to consider/change to increase your Symfony application's performance.

Symfony is an amazing HTTP framework which powers high traffic websites. Performance shouldn't be a concern when first creating a website, because between the time it is launched and the time it actually has a high traffic many things that we didn't expect in the first days will happen: requirements will change, user behavior will change, even the team can change.

Optimizing applications has an impact over maintenance, and making it harder to change right from the beginning might not be the best option. However when the need of performance actually arises, we need to tackle it. This series of articles is about this specific moment, and how to tackle it in a pragmatic way.

He starts with a basic project (Acme) and works through the process of adding a new feature to it: buying an item. He talks about the team they have to work with and the architecture of his sample application (a frontend application mostly). He then works through the data structure and flow of the new feature and other functionality that should be included. He ends the post with a bit of a wrap-up of this first part and talks about the next part in the series where the application will actually be bootstrapped.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post in the "Becoming a PHP Professional" series today from Bruno Skvorc. In this latest post he talks about the importance of other people in the process, including both learning (being mentored) and teaching (mentor).

When you work on improving your skills on your own, you'll often find yourself stuck. In fact, the experts frequently find themselves stuck more often than newbies, but it's the speed and skill with which they "unstick" themselves that makes them stand out in the cold, snowy field of identically unimpressive snowflakes.

He talks about having an "invisible friend" or another non-developer to talk to that may provide a different perspective (see rubber ducking). He covers teams and both the good and bad of being a part of them. He also looks at the mentoring/being mentored relationship and some places you can go to get more information about both in the PHP community. Finally, he looks at a tricky topic - ego in development and the inflation that can happen as your skill level grows.

Others around you – either digitally or in real life – can protect you from both inflation and deflation – a good mentor or colleague will tell you when you're steering wrong, and they'll motivate you when you're in a slump. They'll help you avoid the multi-month cooldown periods and the post-burnout lack of interest that eventually occurs.

In order to help relieve some of the flood of issues that the Zend Framework project has with contributions, a new team has been/is being formed to work with some of the issues surrounding contributions to the framework. Padraic Brady has a new post to his blog talking about the formation of this team.

For those of you not presently keeping watch on the Contributors mailing list or IRC, a Community Review Team (CR Team) has been established to assist with contributions to the Zend Framework. The role of the team will take a bit of time to settle into and explore. [...] Essentially, the CR Team will have an advisory/liason role as it pertains to the proposing and maintenance of components. You should note that it will have limited decision capability, and Zend will continue to issue final approval for new proposals.

Among the duties of this new group there are things like contacting a maintainer on behalf of a contributor, identify orphaned components, solicit community feedback on proposals and notification to Zend when a proposal is ready. Some of the members of this team have already been set including Rob Allen, Padraic, Shaun Farrell and Ben Scholzen. If you're interested in the team or just want to talk with them about your proposal, you can find at least a few of them hanging out in the #zftalk.dev channel on the Freenode IRC network.

You can also read more about it on Rob Allen's blog today.

In the second part of his look at migrating procedural teams to being object-oriented (the first part was a while back - six months ago) Dennis-Jan Broerse comes back with ten steps you can follow to be sure it's the right move to make and and to help the transition along.

After reading all the insightful comments on that post I've compiled a list with 10 steps to migrate your development team to an OO development team successfully. [...] With these 10 steps you are able to successfully migrate your team from a procedural team to an effective OO team.

The steps in the process are all important in their own right - things like "Ask yourself why you want to migrate", "Make a plan" and "Make some resources available" are important for starting out but doing the work and handling the aftermath are just as important. He recommends you "Document the lessons learned" and "spread the knowledge" out amongst the team for the best results.