On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a tutorial posted from Francesco Malaesta about the Laravel Doctrine project, wondering if it's the best of both worlds for connecting to databases and working with entities in your Laravel-based project.

Laravel Doctrine is a drop-in implementation of the famous ORM for the Laravel 5.X Framework, and a really interesting alternative to the default choice, Eloquent. In this article, we will learn how to use it, and when.

He starts with a comparison of the two options - Doctrine vs Eloquent - and why you might choose the former over the latter. He then gets into the installation of a new Laravel project and pulling in the laravel-doctrine/orm package. He then shows it in action with a simple to-do list application, creating an entity for the tasks. From there he shows the use of the EntityManager to add a new task and find ones matching certain criteria. He makes a TaskController to handle the route functionality and creates the matching frontend views to allow the user to define new tasks. Also included is the code for the other "CRUD" (create, read, update, delete) handling for the tasks and the addition of the relationship between users and tasks.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a tutorial posted giving you a crash course on the Wunderlist API and using Guzzle to connect with it. Wunderlist is a task-tracking, to-do list kind of application with support for multiple platforms and, for developers, a nice and relatively easy to use API.

Wunderlist is one of the most popular task management and list keeping applications out there. It allows you to create lists to which you can then add tasks that are easily checkable and have all sorts of functionality built into them. It has native apps for all the major OS’s and all your data syncs effectively over the cloud. It’s very nice to work with if you are trying to keep yourself organized and you can get a lot done even with the free version.

They've posted the final product in a demo repository but they still walk you through the whole process of setting up a simple application that can get, submit and update data via the API:

• Creating the Wunderlist class (a HTTP client)
• Returning data using the Wunderlist API
• Creating and updating data with the Wunderlist API

They also talk a bit more about the OAuth flow the API uses for authentication and points out that the repository also includes a bit more functionality allowing you to get a list and mark the items as complete with a little Ajax.

On the Laravel News site they mention a new quickstart guide that's included in the official Laravel manual now, walking you through the creation of a simple "to do" list application and introducing you to the framework.

The Laravel documentation now includes a dedicated quick start section to guide you through creating a basic task list. For those new to the framework, this is an excellent guide to show you the basics but even the experienced can pick up new tricks. [...] To go along with the tutorial is a Github repo where you can view all the source and easily check it out to play around yourself.

The quickstart steps you through the entire process of creating the application, from a Composer create-project out to the task CRUD (create, read, update, delete) functionality. It shows the use of the Eloquent ORM, routing functionality, views, Blade templates and more. If you're new to the framework and want to check out what it's all about this is a great place to get started.

Flyn San has started (and gotten pretty far along) on a new series of posts to his blog aiming to teach you about the Laravel framework by creating a simple To Do application.

Laravel may be one of the younger frameworks out there but it’s making ripples in the PHP world. The following post teaches how to build a basic to-do application in Laravel 4. It covers a wide range of concepts, links to relevant learning material where possible and should make for a great introduction to the framework.

There's already four parts to the series posted:

• Installation and Routes
• Listing Projects and Tasks
• Create/Edit/Delete
• Validation and Slugs

In each part of the tutorial complete code is provided as well as links to some external resources to get a bit more information about the framework (or the feature being discussed).

New on CodeForest.com today, Luka Peharda has posted the first part of a series that combines the Slim microframework with backbone.js to make a simple tasks (to-do) application.

The app in this tutorial will be called “Tasks”. I know, right? Super creative. This first article will give an introduction to the technologies and the idea of the series. Also, we’ll cover project structure and entire PHP side of the story. In second article we’ll cover Backbone.js side of the story and create simple tasks application which we’ll refine and upgrade in later articles (third and fourth one).

They introduce the two technologies (briefly) and get right in to the directory and database structure they'll be using. They use the NotORM library for accessing the database. Code is included showing the routes for getting, adding, updating and deleting tasks out of the database.

On NetTuts.com there's a recent post from Nikko Bautista about creating an API-centric application and how it can help you make a more flexible, accessible application overall. Code is included to make a simple TODO list application based on this idea.

Planning to start working on a new web application? In this tutorial, we'll discuss how to create an API-centric web application, and explain why this is essential in today's multi-platform world. [...] An API-Centric Web Application is a web application that basically executes most, if not, all its functionality through API calls. [...] Another characteristic of an API-Centric Web Application is that the API will always be stateless, meaning it can’t recognize API calls by session.

He talks about how doing the work like this, though it might seem like more trouble up front, can lead to an easier time later when you need to add multi-platform support (or even open it to customers directly). In the sample application, he shows the creation of a TODO application that can create, read, update and delete items via an API. Also included is a bit of code to help secure your service with an APP ID and APP SECRET authentication set. Full code for the backend API and the frontend to interface with it can be downloaded here.

Lukas Smith has posted some of the things he thinks the Symfony2 framework still has left to do before it can be released in a stable form.

The goal of this blog post is to number one serve me as a todo list of stuff that I personally think needs to be fixed before Symfony2 can be released. Hopefully it will also entice some people to help out with these tasks. I am focusing on the medium to large tasks. There are of course still a fair number of smaller fixes that need to be applied.

Items on the list include:

• switch Security/Validation components to using message key's rather than full sentences
• Assetic documentation
• Adding a DIC aware Serializer
• Better support for SSL'ed urls and assets
• ttempt to automatically determine service scopes

Jim Plush has a new post to his blog today that points out a bit of code you can use to auto-create issues in Jira from your PHP application.

We use Jira at Gravity for tracking issues and bugs. Since I'm not always on VPN or have access to our network managing my todos has been cumbersome. I've tried every Todo app out there and always fail to use them for more than 2 days. I finally saw a great article on just using a simple Todo.txt file in your Dropbox folder and working from that. It's been a dream and working out great.

His tool lets him use the Todo list example to push its contents out to the PHP script that connects to the Jira instance and make a new issue. The code is included in the post, ready for cut-and-pasting.

Lukas Smith has just become the co-release manager for the much anticipated next stable release in the PHP 5.x series - PHP 5.3.

Its quite an honor and a challenge. [...] We hope together we have enough brain cycles to push put what is probably the biggest minor release in the history of PHP. Just take a look at the todo list and the scratchpad detailing all the additions.

He also asks for any help they can get to help identify all of the changes for the new release and to do the usual testing against the current CVS version with applications to see if there's any breakage. The more you test now, the less that has to be fixed post-release - so get out there and get testing!

Lukas Smith is "pre-announcing" the effort he and several other core PHP developers have put together to try and help the PHP language become that much more solid - TestFest.

I am posting this blog post to get a last round of feedback before we go live with a proper announcement on PHP.net. The current state of the discussion is available for all to read on the newly created PHP.net wiki. Please read through it and provide comments either in this blog, in an email to me or to the php-qa mailinglist.

They're also looking for developers to help with the web interface they'll need (the "simple back-end" that the moderators can use to handle the incoming test submissions). Complete information about the event can be found on its wiki page.