The digest of interesting news and materials from the world of PHP over the past two weeks, №4 (03.11.2012 - 16.11.2012)

We bring to your attention another collection with links to news and materials.

Enjoy reading!

News and Releases

• PHP 5.5.0alpha1 is available for testing - A little more than half a year has passed since the release of PHP 5.4.0, and those who wish can already now try out the new features of the upcoming release.
• Symfony CAMP UA 2012 - Very soon, Kiev will host a conference dedicated to Symfony and related topics.
• 8th issue of the Web & PHP magazine - The following topics are covered in this issue:
  Why user context matters, and how to use it when designing applications; Detailed look at data structures in PHP; What is Big Data? Why not use Photoshop to design web pages? other.
• Twig 1.11.0 released - Bugs fixed, improvements made, new template_from_string function added.
• Zend Webinars - In November, many free and interesting webinars are available.

Php

• Yii, frameworks and where is PHP moving to ? Slides from samdark from the last WebConf Riga 2012. A small report about the conference is also available.
• Cryptography on PHP - Slides of the report on cryptography from the recently held conference in Canada - TrueNorthPHP. The goal was to give an understanding of the basic principles to an ordinary developer.
• PHP vs Ruby - In a post, the author attempts to compare two popular web development languages: tells a little about the history and purpose of each, reviews the frameworks (by the way, popular PHP frameworks Zend, Symfony, Yii are ignored), considers the situation with hosting.

Study materials

• Manage PHP dependencies with Composer - If you haven’t tried to touch Composer - a dependency management tool for PHP applications, then you just have to do it right now. Fortunately, there is this wonderful article that discusses the main points when working with Composer. There is also some information about creating your own library and adding it to Packagist.
  In addition, a screencast on Composer is available, and Habré already had a post about this tool.
• Composer Level 2 - The post discusses advanced features for using Composer.
• Scaling Silex code - There is an opinion that microframes are designed only for small applications. With this, generally speaking, it is difficult to disagree, but what if the application on the microfragm begins to grow? In the post, the author gives recommendations on refactoring of an application written in Silex (micromicrosystem built on Symfony2 components): controllers in separate files, putting logic into separate classes- “services”.
• Don't be STUPID, grasp SOLID - Slides talk about SOLID principles with TrueNorthPHP. Briefly and very clearly about the basic principles of software design.
• Analysis of bottlenecks - Slides of a huge and very useful report on the analysis of bottlenecks with the same TrueNorthPHP.
• Caching with Memcached - And again report slides with TrueNorthPHP.
• What to expect from Laravel 4 - Screencasts with a demonstration of the capabilities of the upcoming version of the framework.
• PHP + Apache Stack vs Node.js - As the author himself says: "This is a comparison of an apple with an orange." And, nevertheless, the article discusses the strengths and weaknesses of PHP and Node.js, as well as recommendations, in which cases, which of the technologies is preferable.
• Multilingualism on Symfony2 - The article shows how to organize support for multilingualism using Symfony2 components. Translation is also available .
• Bower and Symfony2 - So, Composer can be used to manage dependencies in PHP, but what about front-end libraries and their dependencies? Use bower. This short note is about using Bower in Symfony2.
• Net Development , 2 , 3 , 4 - A series of articles about dirty code. Why do developers write “dirty” code, what does it lead to, how to “smell” it in the early stages, and, in the end, what to do with it?
• The principle of openness / closeness - Another look at SOLID , namely the letter “O” - the principle of openness / closeness. The author demonstrates the effective application of the principle by the example of creating a class that renders HTML.
• Symfony Live London 2012 - Video recordings of reports from the London conference are available on the SensioLabs channel. Reports not only about symfony, but also about Silex, Composer, Drupal.
• Meet REST on Zend Framework 2 - Detailed tutorial, which describes an example of creating a RESTful application on ZF2.
• Exceptional Exceptions - The article explains how you can use exception handling better.
• Continuous Deployment with Symfony2, Jenkins and Capifony - An excellent post in which the author shows how he set up Capifony and Jenkins to organize continuous deployment of the application on Symfony2. A complete example of a deployment script is attached.
• Building neural networks in php using FANN, an example implementation - An interesting post on Habré on the use of neural networks in PHP on the example of text language recognition.

CMS / CMF

• Typical mistakes when developing for WordPress - In a post, the mistakes that developers make most often are made and recommendations are given on how to avoid them.
• Joomla 3.0.2 is available - Maybe someone missed the news, but at the end of September a new major version of the popular CMS with many new features was released . And most recently, the second update.

• WordPress Plugin Releases

  
  
  • Jetpack 2.0 is a new version of a great plugin that adds functionality on your site that was previously only available to WordPress.com users.
  • Auto Upload Images - automatically uploads images from external resources to your site’s Media Library.
  • Safe Report Comments - gives your site visitors the opportunity to complain about comments.
  • Co-Authors Plus - allows for each post, page or post of a custom type to specify several authors.
  • Slingpic is a plugin that allows users of your site to quickly share pictures from the site on social networks.
  • WP Email Login - allows you to use your email to login to your WordPress site.
  • Quttera Web Malware Scanner - detects malicious code, exploits, obfuscated JavaScript and other suspicious activity on your site.
  • Sharexy - powerful sharinga widget.
  • WordPress Download Manager - helps to manage, monitor and control downloads from your WordPress site.
  • Advanced Page Manager - improves and complements the interface for creating, moving, editing and publishing pages.
  • HiDPI Gravatars - allows you to use images with high resolution Gravatar.
  • Fast Secure Contact Form is a good form of communication with many features and anti-spam protection.
  • Simple Blog Stats - provides a whole set of shortcodes to display various statistics about your site.
  
  

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Link to the previous release.
Material prepared dbritan , nesttor and pronskiy