The "North Meets South" podcast, hosted by Jacob Bennett and Michael Dyrynda, has posted their latest episode - Episode #33: Managing timelines, wireframing, and nested Laravel applications.

Jake and Michael continue with their developing journey and share their approaches to managing timelines. They also talk about different wireframing techniques and setup some future episodes with discussion around containing multiple applications in a single Laravel install.

You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter for updates on when new shows are released.

Matt Stauffer has been busy writing a book to help people get "Up and Running" with the Laravel framework. However, life has caused delays (in the form of a new little girl) but he's back with an update on the book's status and some answers to frequently asked questions about it.

It's been a tumultuous summer, what with Stauffer Child #2 arriving and me finally finishing Laravel: Up and Running. A lot of folks have been asking me about timelines for the book, so let me share what we have here.

He talks about how, despite finishing the actual writing of the book already, the other things that came up added some delays to the final version being ready (like the baby and Laravel v5.3). He wanted the latest from 5.3 to be in the book, so portions were added and updated to include them. For those that just can't wait, there's already a pre-release version you can buy or you can wait until the October/November release date. He ends the post answering a few questions covering who the book is for, what version of Laravel it's for and what it offers that the documentation can't.

In remembrance of the 20th anniversary of PHP, the Zend Developer Zone has created a new post sharing tweets from the PHP Community Twitter account covering the history of PHP.

My friend - and PHP Community Old Guard - Ben (@ramsey) Ramsey did something awesome for PHP's 20th, he tweeted out the PHP timeline. I've gathered them all here to celebrate both PHP and the work he put into this project.

The post shares a long list of the tweets from the account mentioning the happenings of the last twenty years. It starts with the first release of the language back in 1995 (by Rasmus Lerdorf) and goes all the way up through the present day. It's been quite a ride over the last 20 years. If you're new to the PHP community or just want to relive some of the memories of the past, check out the full post!

In the latest post to the SitePoint PHP blog Christophe Willensen shows you how to use PHP and the Neo4j graph database to make efficient user timelines in your application. In this case, "timeline" should be thought of as something like a Twitter or Facebook status update feed.

Any social application you encounter nowadays features a timeline, showing statuses of your friends or followers generally in a descending order of time. Implementing such a feature has never been easy with common SQL or NoSQL databases. Complexity of queries, performance impacts increasing with the number of friends/followers and difficulties to evolve your social model are points that graph databases are eliminating. In this tutorial, we’re going to extend the demo application used by the two introduction articles about Neo4j and PHP.

He starts off with a look at how to model the timeline in the graph database, showing different methods to create the relationships: one a direct user-to-post and the other via a linked list. He goes through the initial setup of the codebase and the sample dataset to populate the Neo4j database. He then includes code samples showing how to get the latest feed items for a user and displaying the results in a simple template (Twig-based). He also shows how to get the latest posts for the timeline and how to add a new post.

The PHP.net website has introduced a new feature to help make it a bit clearer which versions of PHP are supported and which have reached their end-of-life mark. This new Supported versions page off the main site provides listings of currently supported versions and graphical timelines of past (and future) support milestones.

Each release branch of PHP is fully supported for two years from its initial stable release. During this period, bugs and security issues that have been reported are fixed and are released in regular point releases. After this two year period of active support, each branch is then supported for an additional year for critical security issues only. Releases during this period are made on an as-needed basis: there may be multiple point releases, or none, depending on the number of reports.

The page includes information on when the initial release in a series was made (like the 5.4.x or 5.5.x series), when active support did/will end and how long the timeline is for security fixes and support. As of the time of this post, PHP 5.3.x is the only series that has reached end-of-life, but the 5.4.x series is coming close being in security fix only mode now and EOL-ing completely in ten months.

Brian Swan has posted a new timeline to his MSDN blog today about the road that Microsoft has traveled with PHP to get to where they are today.

This morning I came across this article on PHPDeveloper.org: Blast from the Past – One Year Ago in PHP. That brief look into the past got me to thinking about what Microsoft has done lately toward PHP interoperability. (By "lately", I mean in the last few years.) And, I’ve been working on a presentation for TechEd in Berlin next month that will, in part, provide a brief overview of Microsoft’s efforts toward PHP interoperability and support. So, I thought I’d share a bit of that summary here

The timeline runs from back in 2006 when PHP and Windows/IIS/SQL Server just wasn't much of an option through the FastCGI and SQL Server driver years and finally rounding out with WinCache, PHP 5.3 improvements for Windows and the Azure SDK for PHP.

On NETTUTS.com a tutorial has been posted recently showing you how to build a widget for Buzz, the Google's service similar to Twitter. If you've ever worked with the Twitter timeline concept, using Buzz will feel very familiar. Unfortunately, for the moment at least, it's a read-only kind of thing.

At the moment, there’s no API to work with the Buzz service; Google is expected to provide one within the next several months, however, for now, the public updates are available as Atom feeds.

They grab these Atom feeds via a proxy PHP script (can't cross-domain with Ajax, after all) and then some Ajax to real the latest from this proxy. The results are displayed in a (very familiar looking) timeline with the help of the included HTML and CSS/images. The last part of the process is to push it into a jQuery plugin for easier use down the line. You can get the source download here and check out a demo online.

On the Tutorialzine site there's a recent post looking at the creation of an advanced timeline that combines jQuery, PHP and CSS similar to the one Google has.

Today we are making an Advanced Event Timeline with the help of PHP, MySQL, CSS & jQuery, that will display a pretty time line with clickable events. Adding new ones is going to be as easy as inserting a row in the database.

The tutorial includes the XHTML to create the items on the page (like the slider container and the bar), the PHP to get the data from the database and dynamically add the elements for each event, the jQuery code to make the fun slider work and the CSS to style everything.

Brandon Savage has written up some thoughts on what can be a somewhat painful part of software development - creating the specification and schedule for the development of the application.

In the time that I have developed software, I don’t know that I’ve ever met a developer who got excited about writing specs for anything. In fact, most developers loathe writing specs, or developing schedules of any kind. [...] Businesses need schedules to know when products will be finished and schedule things like trade shows, product launches, and write contracts with clients who need or want a particular product.

He has a few recommendations for things that could make the process a little easier including the fact that specs should not be considered documentation, that the developers should be the ones creating them and that scheduling out the development time line isn't all about the actual development.

A few days back Thomas Koch posted a timeline he worked up of the release of several popular PHP quality assurance tools:

Since I'm not a contributor to any QA tool I'll center around the user perspective and the process of establishing these tools in a small to middle web company like YMC. As an outline for the first part I thought to give an historical view on QA in PHP and therefor made a timeline of PHP QA milestones.

He includes both an image of the timeline and the dates as text for the releases of things like PHPUnit, eZ Components, Zend Framework, PHP_Depend and PHPUnderControl.