On the Symfony blog there's an announcement about a few Symfony speakers that are coming to North America (despite the cancelation of SymfonyLive here in the U.S.). These speakers will be a part of the "Symfony Live Track" at this year's php[world] conference happening in Washington, D.C. in November.

In reality, Symfony owes its success to countless people and companies who have not only used Symfony, they've become evangelists, by showing Symfony to friends, writing blog posts, speaking at user groups, creating bundles and using Symfony to create real-world apps that do incredible things.

[...] All that work has made Symfony hugely popular in Europe and other places. And now, we're turning up the heat where I live: the USA! Adoption is already growing fast - especially with the release of Drupal 8 - but there's still a huge opportunity to evangelize and support Symfony here.

[The track]https://world.phparch.com/session-track/symfony/) will include talks from Fabien Potencier and Nicolas Grekas and others. It will cover topics like:

• Symfony 3, the Key Concepts
• Migration Guide to Symfony 3.0
• Profiling PHP Applications
• Symfony vs Silex, Micro vs Full Stack

Check out the full track for more information about these and other talks to be presented during the week.

In a post to the Knp University blog they show you some of the fun you can have with the Symfony Console component in a single file including a few lesser known (and lesser used) features.

One of the best parts of using Symfony's Console component is all the output control you have to the CLI: colors, tables, progress bars etc. Usually, you create a command to do this. But what you may not know is that you can get to all this goodness in a single, flat PHP file.

They walk you through the creation of a ConsoleOutput object with a simple writeln output of a formatted method. They briefly mention the handling for changing up the output (OutputFormatter and OutputFormatterStyle) before getting into something a bit more complex - table layouts. They end the post with an interesting "hidden" feature inside the component, the Symfony track progress bar (animated gif included to show the end result).

The QaFoo team has made available a tool they've created to track changes in PHP projects, the QaFoo Changetrack tool.

Since quite some time I've talked to people about the idea for a tool that tracks changes in the classes and methods of your PHP project in order to detect which entities are changed most frequently, which are often affected bugs and other statistics. After some hacking, we are now making it available on Github.

The tool includes a few commands including one that analyzes the project you point it at (and makes an XML defining its changesets) and another that provides a report of how often a certain method is involved in a change. The post includes an example using the Twig Github repository noting that, because of the analysis being done on each checkout, can take quite a while depending on the age of the project.

On the PHPClasses.org blog today Manuel Lemos has shared some advice on tracking and fixing bugs and some strategies to help prevent them in the future.

No matter how hard you try to test your PHP applications before putting them in production, you will always ship code to your server that has bugs. Some of those bugs will be very serious and need to be fixed before they cause greater damages to your application data that may be too hard to recover. Read this article to learn about a several good practices that you can apply to track bugs in production code, so you can fix them before it is too late.

Suggestions included in his list are things like:

• Test as Much as Possible Before in your Development Environment
• Separate your Code from Environment Configuration files
• Track PHP Errors with Assertion Condition Tests
• Send PHP Errors to an Error Log File
• Monitor the PHP Error Log File to Quickly Fix Serious Bugs
• Fix Your Bugs but Never Edit Code on the Production Server

He also includes a brief look at some things to think about when considering "defensive coding practices" and links to other articles with more information.

On the Symfony blog they talk about the SunshinePHP Conference (happening in Miami, February 8th and 9th) and it's dedicated Symfony track.

The SunshinePHP conference will take place in M-I-A-M-I, what a cool place for a Symfony conference during cold winter time! Save the date, on February 8th & 9th, you can register for two days of Symfony sessions, making this the first Symfony event on the east coast of the USA. The Call for Papers is still open, so do not hesitate to submit a talk about Symfony.

The conference isn't just limited to Symfony sessions either - you can submit on whatever web or PHP-related topics you might like to present. Hurry though, because the Call for Papers ends in less than a week (on December 1st)! For more information about the event or to get your Early Bird tickets (just $159 USD) head over to the main conference site.

The schedule for this year's OSCON conference has officially been announced and there's several PHP sessions on the schedule this year including:

• The MicroPHP Manifesto (Ed Finkler)
• Get Some Rest: Best RESTful API Practices (Lorna Mitchell)
• Daemonizing PHP (Andy Blyler)
• A Stitch In Time Saves Nine: Solving the N+1 Problem (Paul Jones)
• Social Commerce with magento and Open Graph (John Jawed)

There's lots more on the list too, so check out the full list for the PHP track at this year's event! OSCON is being held July 16-20th in Portland, Oregon. For more information on tickets see this page on the conference site.

In a new tutorial today from PHPMaster.com, they show you how to combine Javascript and a PHP feature to track the progress of an upload to your web application.

A problem that has plagued web developers for years is how to add real-time information to their applications, such as a progress bar for file uploads. [...] JavaScript can access a file’s name, type, and even the width and height of a local image, but it wasn’t until HTML5 that it could access a file’s size. [...] In this article I’ll show you how [the session.upload_progress] feature can be used to create a simple upload progress bar without any external libraries or browser dependencies.

The tutorial provides all the steps you'll need to get it working - defining the form with the extra required field, styling it and plugging the Javascript in to call a small script to get the progress of the upload. It returns the difference between the content-length of the file and the current size (as a percentage of 100).

<> On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial from Leidago Noabeb showing how you can track your website's users with the help of sessions and cookies, the handling for which are already included in PHP.

So, why can't you maintain state with HTTP? The main reason is because HTTP is a stateless protocol, meaning that it has no built-in way of maintaining state between transactions. For example, when a user requests one page followed by another, HTTP does not provide a way for us to tell which user made the second request. In this article we will look at what maintaining state in PHP applications entails.

They introduce cookies and how they can be used to store information about the user's session on their client for a certain amount of time. This makes it much simpler for the cross-page or cross-session details to persist. There's a bit of code showing how to set and get a cookie and how to do the same with a session.

On PHPBuilder.com there's a new tutorial posted showing you how to create a user authentication system that uses sessions to handle the logged in user's information.

Outside of installation and configuration issues, reader questions pertaining to user authentication and session management almost certainly rank among the most common I receive on an ongoing basis. The logic itself is pretty straightforward; however, even a simple implementation involves a number of small but important details which aren't always so easy to figure out the first time around. This tutorial serves to dispel much of the confusion by guiding you through the implementation of a simple user authentication feature which will subsequently keep the user logged in via a session.

He helps you create the simple login form, a table in MySQL to store the user data in and the PHP script (complete with input filtering) to handle the login. The system also tracks the last login of each user by updating the table with a timestamp each time they successfully log in.

Till Klampaeckel has put together this new post looking at the track_errors ini option (that will always put the latest error message in $phperrormsg) and how it can help you more efficiently handle the errors your application throws.

track_errors provides the means to catch an error message emitted from PHP. It's something I like to use during the development of various applications, or to get a handle on legacy code. Here are a few examples why!

He gives the example of a failed file_get_contents that results in a warning. He suggests that, instead of suppressing the error, you set display_errors to "off" and throw an exception when on the failure. There's trade-offs though including the fact that it's in the global scope and additional work would have to be done to handle problems inside other scopes.