The Laravel News site has published the latest part in a series covering the creation of a translation package for use in a Laravel-based application. In this new post they focus on how the package will handle missing translation keys.

In the last installment of this series, we talked about building the frontend translation management tool. In this article, we are going to move away from the frontend and follow the process of building another backend feature.

One of the most frustrating things about translation management in a Laravel application is forgetting to add translations to the corresponding language file. This has the undesirable result of either the translation key or the default language being rendered on the page rather than the translation for the current language.

To remediate this issue, they design the package so that it will search the whole project and return the keys that don't have translations currently defined. They walk you through the creation of this functionality complete with the configuration and code required to locate the missing translations and update the configuration to add them.

On the TutsPlus.com site they've posted a tutorial for those new to PHP and MySQL out there sharing the basics of CRUD operations using the built-in language functionality ("CRUD" stands for "Create, Read, Update, Delete").

In this article, we're going to explore how you could use a MySQL database to perform CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) operations with PHP. If you want to get your hands dirty with database connectivity in PHP, this article is a great starting point.

If you are just getting started with PHP, you probably realize that database connectivity is an essential feature that you'll need to get familiar with sooner or later. In most cases, a database is the backbone of any web application and holds the data of the application. So, as a PHP developer, you'll need to know how to deal with database operations.

In this article, we'll keep things simple and explore how to use the core mysqli functions. In upcoming articles of this series, we'll explore a couple of other ways to handle database connectivity.

They then walk you through some of the basics of:

• creating the connection to the database
• selecting information from the database
• inserting and updating records
• how to pull the record information
• deleting records from the database tables

Each item on the list comes with plenty of explanation and example code to get you on the right path to learn these basic concepts.

Jason McCreary has provided a tutorial on his site today for all of the OS X Mojave users out there about how to install Apache, PHP and MySQL on macOS with the latest operating system changes. This is an update of his previous post covering the same installation on OSX Sierra.

I am aware of the web server software available for macOS, notably MAMP, as well as package managers like brew. These get you started quickly. But they forego the learning experience and, as most developers report, can become difficult to manage.

The thing is macOS runs atop UNIX. So most UNIX software installs easily on macOS. Furthermore, Apache and PHP come preinstalled with macOS. To create a local web server, all you need to do is configure Apache and install MySQL.

He walks you through the full process to get everything up and running:

• testing to ensure Apache can be started (it comes installed by default)
• changing the configuration to enable PHP
• making a phpinfo page in your DocumentRoot to test that PHP is working
• downloading and installing MySQL
• configuration changes required to connect PHP and MySQL

He also includes an example of additional changes such as enabling mod_rewrite and a link to a tutorial about setting up virtual hosts on your local machine.

Over the past several weeks the Symfony project blog has released a series of posts detailing new features in the 4.2 release of the framework. Here's the current listing of those posts:

• Simpler functional tests
• DivisibleBy constraint
• Autowiring by type and name
• PDO-based lock storage
• Console tables improvements
• SameSite cookie configuration
• VarExporter component

Each post includes a summary of the changes or additions and some example code and configuration showing it in use.

If you're looking for a good summary of what's coming up in the next major version of PHP (v7.3), look no further than this new post from the Cloudways blog.

PHP is surely giving a tough competition to other scripting languages, thanks to the developers for the rapid updates they unleash from time to time. [...] In the series of these updates, PHP recently has got another milestone with the release of RC1 of PHP 7.3. The version also got some new much-needed updates. While the official release date of PHP 7.3 is given of late December 2018.

In this blog, I will discuss newly introduced PHP 7.3 features and updates.

The post then goes through several of the improvements and new features, providing code examples and descriptions for:

• Flexible Heredoc and Nowdoc Syntaxes
• the PCRE2 Migration
• is_countable function
• Argon2 Password Hash Enhancements
• Same Site Cookie

...just to name a few. There are several others included in the post as well. While PHP 7.3 hasn't been released as a final version yet, you can test these changes out via the current release candidate in your development: PHP 7.3.0RC2. Additionally, more information about the RFCs - including those that weren't accepted - can be found on the PHP wiki.

Tomas Vortuba has a new post on his site sharing information about one of the improvements that has been added to the Symplify, specifically in the PackageBuilder.

PackageBuilder was always sort of meta package with all the cool and shiny features anyone can use. After all, it's the most downloaded Symplify package hitting almost 1000 downloads a day.

In Symplify 5 now it allows you to drop manual binds from Symfony configs, separate files from directories in one method and merge nested YAML parameters with 1 service.

He lists out the three notable changes:

1. Drop Manual Binds in Symfony configs
2. Separate Files from Directories
3. Merge Parameters without Leaving Any Behind

For each item in the list, he provides a link to the pull request that implemented it, a basic summary of the changes and code examples of what it enables.

On the Laravel News site they've posted an announcement recommending all Laravel 5.6.x and 5.5.x users upgrade to the latest release (5.6.30 & 5.5.42) due to a security issue dealing with the APP_KEY value.

Laravel 5.6.30 and Laravel 5.5.42 have both been released to fix a security issue and is recommended that all users upgrade as soon as possible.

This update also includes changes to cookie encryption and serialization logic. In addition to the upgrade, they also recommend rotating the key if you believe any malicious user (or former developer/employee) had access to it. The upgrade guide has the information you need to make the update to your application.

The Delicious Brains site has posted an update for the last part (10 of 10) of their series providing a guide to hosting WordPress yourself for some smaller changes for doing it in 2018.

I originally started writing Hosting WordPress Yourself back in February 2015, which makes this series over three years old! During that time a lot has changed, which is why I updated the series just over 12 months ago, to keep the content relevant. Since then, even more has changed in the WordPress hosting scene, so it’s time for another update!

I have already updated the existing articles in this series with the changes that follow. This article serves as a changelog and documents what has changed in each part of this series, where I guide you through the process of building a complete server to house your WordPress sites

This update shares changes in the virtual server setup, new software releases, suggestions of server monitoring services and web server configuration changes. Each point in the list is also linked back to the other part of the series related to the changes to give more context.

The ZFort Group blog has posted their latest PHP Digest for March 1st - 25th, 2018: Digest #15.

A tool for quick smoke testing, a PHP parser in PHP, a cool extension for PhpStorm, an object graph visualizer, a library for implementing Event Sourcing in PHP apps, the lightweight in-memory message queue, and more. This digest seems to be really informative. Keep on reading!

Included in this list are topics like:

• News about the PHP language and releases
• PHP internals changes (moving towards PHP 7.3)
• Links to various interesting and useful tools
• Links to other tutorials, articles and updates from various projects.

The projects in that last item include Laravel, Zend Framework, Drupal and Symfony. Check out the full post for the full content.

In a new post to his site Tomas Votruba covers a recent release of the "symplify/package-builder" package for Symfony, detailing each of the updates and including examples of the change in action.

Symplify 4 was released and with it also one package, that contains all the Symfony tweaks that Symplify packages use.

Throwable render? Test services without public violation? Load parameters with glob? We got you covered!

The four new features are:

• Console-Like -vvv-Aware Renders for Exceptions and Errors
• Drop Manual public: true for Every Service You Test
• Autowire Singly-Implemented Interfaces
• How to Decouple Parameters to multiple files in Safe Way

Each section also comes with some explanation of the change, the code related to it and configuration changes if they're required. You can find out more about the package on its GitHub repository.