In this new post to the Pehapkari.cz site they take a look at the PHP user groups all around the world and share some interesting statistics.

In April 2018 I started a side project to list meetups in Europe near Prague. PHP meetups are so much fun and I didn't find any single-page with a map that would list them. In the start, this site had a small table, with 10 meetups a month, very modern black/white Times New Roman design and advanced human-manual updating.

Since then I got feedback from dozens friends and users with this WTFs and ideas - they helped me to add feature now and then, polish a design with emoji and Bootstrap, automate everything and even crawl over 150 urls. I bought friendsofphp.org domain and the project became a standalone single page.

Based on the results shared in the post, there's over 1000 PHP-specific meetups all around the world! It also highlights the most active region (most meetups for the area): the area around Belgium. There's also a list of several cool features of the friendsofphp.orgsite and a more technical description of how the site works and gathers its data.

On the Symfony blog they've posted an announcement about the launch of the SymfonyLive Paris 2019 website, the Symfony-focused event happening March 28th and 29th in Paris, France.

Last week, we announced the dates of the next edition of the French SymfonyLive conference, March 28-29. Today we're very pleased to announce that the conference website is now online! Early bird registration is open as well as the >Call For Papers. You can start submit your talk proposals (in French) for the conference. CFP will be open until December 17th (included). We encourage you to submit several talk proposals to increase your chances of selection.

[...] Early bird registration is open until December 17th (included). You can register for the 2 days of conference on March 28-29 for 239€ (breakfast, lunch, food for both days and your free conference t-shirt are included)! We organize pre-conference workshops on March 26-27, the workshops' topics will be announced soon, stay tuned!

If you're curious to see what kind of content has been presented in the past at SymfonyLive conferences, check out their YouTube channel. Otherwise, start getting those ideas submitted!

On the Symfony blog they've posted about an additional update they've made to bring more information to the community: an Events section.

Following the new features we've added in May in the Events & Meetups section, we're pleased to introduce a brand new section within the main website menu: Symfony Events. This will enable you to find a Symfony event near you more easily.

[...] The Events section itself has also been improved, again! We've added a map where you can see at a glance where are organized all the upcoming Symfony events. You can find on the map: all the upcoming official Symfony conferences pinned in red and all the upcoming Symfony community events pinned in blue.

They also added a feature that will automatically pull in Symfony events from the Meetup.com site so there's no need to list them in both places.

The TutsPlus.com site has posted a new tutorial showing the CodeIgniter users out there how to manage multiple sites written using the framework. Traditionally CodeIgniter applications needed to be run as separate instances but their method simplifies the setup by needing only one instance for all.

Today, we’re going to explore how you can manage multiple applications in the CodeIgniter web framework using a single codebase. In the course of that, we’ll go ahead and create two different CodeIgniter applications that will share the core CodeIgniter codebase.

Sharing the core codebase across different applications is not something new as it’s already practiced by different frameworks and open-source systems, and CodeIgniter is no different. It easily allows you to manage multiple applications that share the core CodeIgniter library and API files, and at the same time you could use different databases and site-specific configurations.

The article then starts with some of the benefits of using a multisite setup including simpler maintenance and the ability to use different databases for each. It then gets into the process for creating multiple applications using separate directories under an "applications" directory and creating sample "welcome" content under each. Finally, they make some changes to the configuration to use an environment variable to switch out which front controller (index.php) file to direct the request to (as set up in the web server config).

The Toptal.com site has a tutorial posted from Igor Gomes dos Santos about building a multilingual site with a combination of gettext and PHP.

Whether you are building a website or a full-fledged web application, making it accessible to a wider audience often requires it to be available in different languages and locales.

Fundamental differences between most human languages make this anything but easy. The differences in grammar rules, language nuances, date formats, and more combine to make localization a unique and formidable challenge. [...] The way your code is organized, and how your components and interface are designed, plays an important role in determining how easily you can localize your application.

The tutorial starts off talking about some of the difficulties that come along with internationalization of an application and how localization comes into play. He then starts talking about gettext and links to several PHP libraries that can help you integrate support for it into a current (or new) application. He walks you through the setup of gettext, how the PO/MO files are structured and other things to like about like domain separation, locale codes and the directory structure of your PO/MO files. He then gets into a practical example, showing a sample PO file's contents, two schools of thought on the identifiers in the file and a simple template that uses the "gettext" to get a translation. He also includes code to set up the locale correctly and create the language files for it to use.

Matthias Noback has started a series to his site showing you how to use Docker along with a static site, like one generated with Sculpin to create a complete environment. So far he's posted part one and part two.

Recently a former colleague of mine, Lucas van Lierop, showed me his new website, which he created using Spress. Lucas took two bold moves: he started freelancing, and he open-sourced his website code. This to me was very inspiring. I've been getting up to speed with Docker recently and am planning to do a lot more with it over the coming months, and being able to take a look at the source code of up-to-date projects that use Docker is certainly invaluable.

Taking lots of inspiration from Lucas's codebase, and after several hours of fiddling with configuration files, I can now guide you through the steps it took to containerize my blog (which is the site you're visiting now) and deploy a single container to a production server.

In part one he talks about how his blog is currently set up - based on a "large set of Markdown files" - and using Sculpin to generate the resulting site. He walks through the configuration of the Sculpin installation and how to configure and build the initial container, the "build" container.

In part two he continues the process but creates a "blog" container this time. This container runs the web server itself (nginx) configured as required by the Sculpin formatting.

The Laravel News site Eric Barnes has a post about the latest addition to the Laravel ecosystem (that includes the framework, Envoyer and Homestead) - Laravel Valet.

Laravel Valet is the next generation development environment for Mac minimalists. No Vagrant, No Apache, No Nginx, No /etc/hosts file. “I wanted to have the convenience of php artisan serve without ever having to run php artisan serve“, Taylor said when asked why he created it.

Valet works by hooking into your Mac’s built-in PHP server then it utilizes DnsMasq to proxy all requests to the .dev TLD to sites on your local machine.

The post links to the official documentation and an article he's written up with a "first look" at the new tool.

A highly anticipated project in the Laravel community - Laravel Spark - has officially launched its site providing more information about the product and its upcoming release. Laravel News gives its own brief summary of Spark in a new post:

Spark is a complete scaffolding for building a SaaS app including authentication, password reset, billing plans, payment method updates, invoices, coupons, user impersonation, and more with support for Stripe and Braintree.

The official release date is April 19th, next Tuesday, and although no pricing is on the site the rumor is it’ll be less than $100. This will save you many hours from building it all yourself.

For those interested in finding out a bit more in-depth about the product, check out this recently released screencast over on the Laracasts site where Taylor Otwell shows the basic setup and features of the platform.

The PHP Framework Interoperability Group (or PHP-FIG for short) has just released a new version of their website with a great new look and even better organization for the PSR content: http://php-fig.org. They just tweeted about it too:

What do you think of our new website? Slicker, cleaner and easier on the eyes. Give us your feedback! :)

The new version of the site provides sections not only for the details around currently accepted standards but also on current proposals, members of the organization, bylaws and frequently asked questions about the group. They also have links to some resources where you can get involved if you're interested in the group and what they're up to.

php[architect], the group behind the php[tek] and the php[world] conferences has posted more information about the latest addition to their conference lineup coming in 2016 - php[cruise]. They've launched the full conference site over at cruise.phparch.com

Well we’ve already actually announced it at php[tek] 2015, but it’s time to start sharing some information about it.

Yes, we are going to revive php[cruise], and once again host a conference-cruise for the PHP community. This 7 day cruise will take place from July 17-23, 2016 and leave from the port of Baltimore.

We still have lots of details to work out – but wanted to make sure that everyone was aware of this early! We will be working on making this a family friendly experience. Daycare/kids activities are included in the cost and we are even looking at scheduling some 'teach kids to code' type events.

The cruise will be happening in July 2016 (17th through 24th) and will feature several days of talks as well as plenty of time to enjoy the cruise and evening activities. One thing to note, the cost of the ticket for the conference does not include the cost for the cruise itself. That is paid separate because of the wide variety of accommodations available (and how many will be in your party). One of the goals with this event was to make it as family-friendly as possible, so the schedule isn't wall-to-wall talks like a normal conference. There's plenty of time to enjoy the trip and be with loved ones should they come along.

You can find out more about this conference at sea over on the official php[cruise] website.