On the Laravel News site today there's a new post covering the release of BotMan v2.0, one of the more popular chatbot libraries for PHP.

BotMan is a framework agnostic PHP Chatbot framework designed to simplify the task of developing innovative bots for multiple messaging platforms, including Slack, Telegram, Microsoft Bot Framework, Nexmo, HipChat, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and many more.

BotMan 2.0 was released earlier this week with a bunch of improvements and exciting changes.

As a part of this new release, functionality was abstracted out into separate repositories making it easier to maintain those features without having to change core code. They then include an example of using the the library to create a simple chatbot that replies to a simple "hello" message. They also cover some of the more advanced features including middleware handling and natural language processing support. There's also a tool, BotMan Studio, that's included with the package to help make testing your chatbot script easier. The post wraps up with an example of using this to test the chatbot and a list of some of the other new features in v2.0.

The Zend Framework blog has a tutorial they've posted showing you how to migrate up to Zend Expressive v2.0 from a v1.x application and some of the things that could break along the way.

Last week, we released Expressive 2. A new major version implies breaking changes, which often poses a problem when migrating. That said, we did a lot of work behind the scenes to try and ensure that migrations can happen without too much effort, including providing migration tools to ease the transition.

In this tutorial, we will detail migrating an existing Expressive application from version 1 to version 2.

Using this repository for a testbed, they walk through the steps for the update:

• Creating a migration branch
• Updating dependencies
• using the zendframework/zend-expressive-tooling to aid in the migration
• scanning your code to find possible breaking locations
• moving over to the programmatic pipeline structure

They also include some bonus information covering self-invoking functions, the zend-config-aggregator and development mode. The post ends with the updates you'll need to make to middleware to implement the http-interop/http-middleware MiddlewareInterface.

On the Zend Framework blog today Matthew Weier O'Phinney has posted the official announcement of the release of Zend Expressive v2.0, the latest major release with several large changes.

Today we're excited to announce Expressive 2.0! What has changed since 1.0 was released last year? The short version: we've been providing changes that standardize, simplify, and streamline application development in Expressive.

Updates in this latest version include:

• PSR-11 (ContainerInterface) support
• Programmatic pipelines
• An emphasis on modularized applications
• Extensible routing and dispatch middleware

The post gets into details on each of the above topics and several others. It also shows how to install this latest version via Composer (or install the skeleton application to get up and running quickly).

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.

The Squizlabs blog has an announcement about the release of the latest major version of the popular PHP_CodeSniffer tool for PHP - CodeSniffer v2.0. Among the updates in this latest release is a major one - the automated fixing of issues the tool finds.

Nineteen months ago, I started work on a project to allow PHP_CodeSniffer to fix the problems that it finds. Doing this required a lot of changes to the core classes, a lot of iteration and refactoring of the fixing and testing code, and an enormous amount of time and testing across many PHP projects to ensure I am confident enough to release something that actually modifies code. I could keep writing unit tests forever, but I've finally got to a point where I am happy to release this first version of the PHP Code Beautifier and Fixer (PHPCBF), for when you just can't be bothered fixing coding standard errors yourself.

The fixes are made possible through the newly introduced "PHP Code Beautifier and Fixer" (PHPCBF) tool. When the CodeSniffer tool is run against your code the PHPCBF kicks in too and tells you which of the issues can be automatically fixed. Additionally, you can now add custom code to your custom sniffer rules to enable this auto-fix functionality yourself. He also includes a list of the other updates in the release including:

• a new information report to show you how your code is written rather than if it conforms to a standard
• the ability to set command line arguments in ruleset.xml files
• the ability to create your own custom reporting classes and use them with PHP_CodeSniffer
• support for running on HHVM

You can find out more information about this release in the PEAR or GitHub changelogs.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post today from Arno Slatius that talks about some of the features coming in Yii 2.0, a PHP-based MVC framework with a target for a stable release coming very soon.

Yii 2.0 was released into beta last April and the goal for a first stable release was set for the middle of 2014. The GitHub issue list has 300 open issues and 2913 closed while I’m writing this and both numbers are still increasing. The progress to the 2.0RC milestone was at 99%. My guess is that the team is close, but we’ll probably have to wait just a little bit longer. While we’re all waiting, lets take a look at what we can expect by looking at an already available example.

He starts with a "tiny bit of history" about the framework (its origins, the work done on 2.0) and talks about some of the requirements to get it installed and working. He helps you set up a sample project and shows off the Twitter Bootstrap integration, the debug bar and the "Gii" tool that can help generate code automatically (following the conventions of the framework). He finishes off the post with a look at some of the main things that changed in the 2.0 release including moving some method calls to properties, datetime handling, behavior definitions and model/view updates.

The Bakery (a CakePHP site) has announced the release of CakePHP 2.0, a major shift in the framework with some very large changes to bring it up to the level of other full-stack frameworks currently offered for PHP.

The CakePHP core team is very exited to announce a major jump in the version numbering. CakePHP 2.0 stable is out! we have put endless hours into this release and great ideas have made it into the the framework for this version. [...] The overall CakePHP ecosystem has also been improved. [...] A huge thanks to all involved in terms of both contributions through commits, tickets, documentation edits, and otherwise contribute to the framework. Without you there would be no CakePHP.

Some huge changes have happened in this release including:

• Dropping PHP4 support
• Use of more native PHP functions
• PSR-0 compliance
• Object injection for libraries/components/helpers/etc
• Console tools completely rebuilt
• A move to PHPUnit tests (away from SimpleUnit)
• HTML support in form helpers
• Lazy-loading on just about everything making the overall experience faster
• Several new plugins like: DebugKit, Datasources, MongoDb, Migrations and AclExtras

They've created a few resources to help you get started with this new version including a new version of the book, a screencast and a migration guide.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney, lead on the Zend Framework project, has a new post to his blog talking about the event manager in the Zend Framework, v2 and how to use it in a refectored version of a previous post.

Earlier this year, I wrote about Aspects, Intercepting Filters, Signal Slots, and Events, in order to compare these similar approaches to handling both asychronous programming as well as handling cross-cutting application concerns in a cohesive way. I took the research I did for that article, and applied it to what was then a "SignalSlot" implementation within Zend Framework 2, and refactored that work into a new "EventManager" component. This article is intended to get you up and running with it.

You'll need to already have an install of the Zend Framework (v2) installed to follow along. He covers some of the basic terminology and the base code the rest of the tutorial's built from - a simple EventManager instance with a trigger on it. He moves on from there showing how to specify targets for the triggers, setting up global static listeners and listener aggregates as well as how to short circuit listener execution. He wraps up the post by applying all of the examples into one simple caching tool that responds to the trigger by either sending back a new instance or pulling the previously generated one from the cache.