On the CodeWall.co.uk blog Dan Englishby has shared his list of what he considers the "must have" extensions for the Visual Studio Code editor for PHP developers to help make them more productive and make their jobs simpler.

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is completely competent with the PHP language. It’s something that shocked me personally when it was released as I really didn’t expect it to come prepared for PHP developers. But yep, it is a valid development environment for PHP, and of course, there are plenty of extensions to be used with it.

In this article, I will go through the best available extensions that can be installed with your version of VSCode. With this list of essential extensions you can configure your Visual Studio Code IDE into a wizardry-code-environment.

His list includes tools for a wide range of tooling and helpful functions including:

• PHP Intellisense
• DocBlocker
• PHP Getter & Setter
• Custom Snippet Pack
• PHP Files Extension

Each item in the list has a link to the extension in the VSCode marketplace and a brief description of what it can do.

On the TechBeacon site there's a new tutorial posted sharing a list of nine ways to master awful code and make it more efficient, easier to maintain and clearer.

You've been given the task of implementing a new feature on an old codebase, but the code looks awful. How can you understand it as quickly as possible? Here are several shortcuts to help learn the important parts of new code without getting lost in the irrelevant details.

Their suggestions range from technical to non-technical and include:

• Ask for help
• Make it easy to reproduce bugs (add version control, build environments)
• Prepare for automated testing
• At first, work on a small task

For each item in the list there's an explanation and links (or screenshots) of other resources to help illustrate their point.

The Arpatech.com blog has a new post sharing their list of top nine things to know about PHP 7 with some brief explanations for each. It's not an in-depth coverage of the features in this latest major release of the language but it does give a nice overview for those not familiar with what really changed.

If you are a web developer or a website owner, and you love to use CMS that are PHP-enabled like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or PHP timetable, PHP 7 which was released on 3 December 2015, is now ready for the production use.

Yes you heard it right! PHP 7 is out to use. We are going to tell all the great things you need to know about PHP 7.

They've included several types of topics in their list, both code and performance related:

• PHPNG, the New Core
• Double the Speed
• New Spaceship (<=>) and Null Coalescing (??) Operators
• Enables Accurate Type Declarations
• Imports from the Same Namespace

Each item on the list comes with a brief summary of what the improvement offers and, in the case of code-related items, a quick snippet showing it in action.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted an article for the Laravel Spark users out there, sharing their top nine tips for getting the most out of the popular "boilerplate" tool.

A while ago, I wrote about a product I wanted to build, to allow easy remote backups for Pagekit sites. I’ve been working on it (periodically) since then, and have come across a few interesting bits of advice.

I decided to use Laravel Spark as the foundation for the product, and I thought it would be helpful to share the advice. Whether you’re just starting your Spark app, or are in maintenance mode, I think you’ll find some of these tips useful!

His tips cover a wide range of the product's features:

• You Don’t Have to Keep All the Base Files
• Use Simple Repositories
• Don’t use caret (^) Laravel dependencies
• Host on Forge
• Re-Arrange Middleware

Each of these comes with a description and, where appropriate, a bit of code to help clarify the point.

If you’re on the fence about trying Spark, I can recommend it. It’s given my product a head-start it wouldn’t have had otherwise. Hopefully these tips will save you even more time.