On the Laravel News site there's a new post sharing some of the new Blade directives coming in the 5.6 version of the Laravel framework.

Laravel 5.6 will include two new form blade directives for cross-site request forgery (CSRF) and HTTP method input, thanks to Taylor Otwell.

The new CSRF handling replaces the previously used format with a simple @csrf tag in the Blade template (inside of the form). The other is related to the method used to submit the form. The new addition allows you to submit the form via something other than POST using the method_field function.

On the Kinsta blog there's a new tutorial by Carlo Daniele with a look ahead at the next version of the PHP language - PHP 7.2 - and what you can expect.

Currently in RC3, PHP 7.2 is planned to be released on November 30. The new release is coming with new features, functions, and improvements that will allow us to write better code. In this post, I will introduce some of the most interesting language features coming with PHP 7.2.

You can see the full list of upcoming changes on the Requests For Comments page.

Their list covers a number of the updates coming in this version including:

• Argument type declarations [for objects]
• Parameter Type Widening
• Trailing commas in list syntax
• Several security improvements

They also cover some of the functionality that's being deprecated and what kind of impact this new version will have on WordPress users.

In a new post to his site Martin Hujer looks ahead at the next major release for the PHP language - PHP 7.2 - and what new features and changes are coming with it.

PHP 7.2 is planned to be released on 30th November 2017 (see the timetable). And it comes with two new security features in the core, several smaller improvements and some language legacy clean-ups. In the article, I will describe what the improvements and changes are. I read the RFCs, discussions on internals and PRs on Github, so you don't have to.

Among the changes he lists are updates like:

• Argon2 Password Hashing
• Make Libsodium a Core Extension
• Object typehint
• Counting of non-countable objects

He also lists out some of the things that will be deprecated in 7.2 including parse_str without a second argument, create_function, mbstring.func_overload and asset with a string argument. You can check out these and other other changes coming (along with code examples) in the full post.

On the Kinsta blog there's a post detailing some of the new features that are coming in the next release in the PHP 7 series - PHP 7.10.

The newest version of PHP – 7.1.0 – is already at RC6 (Release Candidate 6) status, which means it will be out soon. After a huge update that took PHP from 5.6 straight to 7.0 increasing speeds considerably, PHP is now focusing on core language features that will help all of us write better code. In this article I’ll take a look at the major additions and features of PHP 7.1.0 which is just around the bend.

Their list of items includes:

• nullable types
• iterable and void returns
• the use of keys in lists
• number operators and malformed numbers

Each item in the list includes a brief description and some example code show the feature in use where it makes sense. If you're not overly familiar with what's coming in PHP 7.1 this is a great guide.

On the Symfony blog they've posted an update about their upcoming Symfony Live London event happening in just three weeks.

We’re almost there! Only 3 weeks until the SymfonyLive London conference! We’re getting more and more ready as the days go, what about you? It’s high time you got your ticket!

What’s in store for you?

The post goes on to talk about the different features of the conference including:

• Pre-conference workshops on September 15th
• A full day double-track conference
• The sponsor village
• The Social event with all the attendees

They also mention a raffle they're holding to give away Symfony elePHPants to a select few individuals. You must purchase your ticket during a certain time to be entered into the raffle but you could win an elePHPant or a full reimbursement of your ticket to the conference. Check out the full post for more details.

Fans of the Monolog logging library (used by loads of major PHP-based projects too) will be interested in checking out this post about version 2 from Jordi Boggiano, lead developer on the project.

Monolog's first commit was on February 17th, 2011. That is almost 5 years ago! I have now been thinking for quite a while that it would be nice to start on a v2, and being able to drop some baggage.

One of the main questions when doing a major release is which minimum PHP version to support going forward. Last summer I decided I wanted to do a big jump from 5.3 and directly target PHP 7. It provides a lot of nice features as well as performance improvements, and as Monolog is one of the most installed packages on Packagist I wanted to help nudge everyone towards PHP 7.

Now that PHP 7 has been released, he's moving even more towards this goal for version 2 of the popular tool. He talks about "the road forward" and links to a milestone that's been set up with issues to correct and features to update before v2.0 can be called stable. He does offer a word of warning too - if you use dev-master for your Composer installs, update it to use ^1.17 instead as the main branch will break soon with the work for v2.

With the next Laravel release (5.1) coming soon, the Laravel News site has gathered together all of the information that's been shared about what's to come. In this new post they list some of the updates and code where needed to illustrate.

Laravel 5.1 is scheduled for release in May and lots of new features will be included in this release. Here is a list of eight of the big changes and new features.

Their list of eight includes things like:

• LTS, Long Time Support
• Resolve a service from blade
• Middleware Parameters
• Broadcasting Events

You can find out more about these and others on the list in the full post.

On the SitePoint PHP blog Bruno Skvorc has posted a guide to what's new in PHP 5.6, the upcoming release of the language.

It's been a while since the release of PHP 5.4, and new versions have been coming out faster and faster ever since. When 5.5 hit and introduced some unexpectedly great features, the PHP community breathed a sigh of relief and regained hope of a more dedicated, structured and smart core development. Whether or not we'll actually get this remains to be seen, but the future does indeed look promising, especially if one looks at the PHP 5.6 changes made so far.

He goes through the list of things (so far) that will be in the upcoming release:

• MIME types in the CLI web server
• Internal Operator Overloading
• Uploads of over 2GB are now accepted
• POST data memory usage decreased
• Improved syntax for variadic functions
• Constant Scalar Expressions
• PHPDBG bundled by default
• Zip improved
• Importing namespaced functions

Each item on the list comes with either some sample code to show its use or a brief explanation of the features it adds or updates.

The PHPClasses.org site has released the latest episode of their "Lately in PHP" podcast series with episode #42, "New PHP 5.6 Developments".

s the release of PHP 5.6 gets closer to happen in first semester of 2014, more new features are already being implemented including a new PHP debugger. The latest PHP 5.6 developments is one of the main topics discussed by Manuel Lemos and César Rodas in the episode 42 of the Lately in PHP podcast.

They go through some of the things that have been discussed to be included in PHP 5.6 including

• the Expectations proposal
• ** as Power Operator
• Assigning Variables Automatically in the Class Constructor
• PHPDbg, a New PHP Debugger

You can listen to this latest episode a few different ways - either through the in-page player, by grabbing the mp3 or you can watch the video of the live recording.

On PHPClasses.org today they've posted the latest episode of their podcast, "Lately in PHP", episode #40 - "More New Features for PHP 5.6".

The proposals of new features for PHP 5.6 continues to come. Several new interesting features are being discussed like named parameters, anonymous classes, nested classes, among other proposals. This was the main topic discussed by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert in episode 40 of the Lately in PHP podcast.

You can listen to this latest episode in a few different ways - either by using the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by watching the video of the recorded Google Hangout.