The digest of interesting news and materials from the world of PHP for the last two weeks No. 4 (November 3, 2012 - November 16, 2012)

We bring to your attention the next selection with links to news and materials.

Enjoy reading!

News and Releases

• PHP 5.5.0alpha1 is available for testing - A little more than six months have passed since the release of PHP 5.4.0, and those who wish can now try out new features of the upcoming release.
• Symfony CAMP UA 2012 - Very soon in Kiev will host a conference on Symfony and related topics.
• 8th issue of Web & PHP magazine - The following topics are covered in the issue:
  Why does the user context matter and how to use it when designing applications; A detailed look at data structures in PHP; What is Big Data? Why not use Photoshop for web page design? 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 PHP is heading - Slides from samdark lecture from WebConf Riga 2012. A small conference report is also available.
• PHP Cryptography - Slides on a cryptography report from a recent Canadian conference - TrueNorthPHP. The goal was to give an understanding of the basic principles to the ordinary developer.
• PHP vs Ruby - In a post, the author makes an attempt to compare two popular web development languages: he tells a little about the history and purpose of each, makes a review of the frameworks (by the way, the popular PHP frameworks Zend, Symfony, Yii are ignored), considers the situation with hosting services.

Learning Materials

• PHP Dependency Management with Composer - If you haven’t tried it by touch, Composer is a dependency management tool for PHP applications, then you must do it right now. Fortunately, there is this wonderful article that discusses the main points when working with Composer. There is also some information on creating your own library and adding it to Packagist.
  Besides, a screencast on Composer is available , and there was already a post on Habré about this tool.
• Composer Level 2 - This post discusses advanced features for using Composer.
• Silex code scaling - There is an opinion that microframes are intended only for small applications. Generally speaking, it’s hard to disagree with this, but what if the application on the microframework starts to grow? In a post, the author gives recommendations for refactoring an application written in Silex (a microframework built on Symfony2 components): controllers in separate files, transferring logic to separate “service” classes.
• Don't be STUPID, grasp SOLID - Slides on the SOLID Principles Report with TrueNorthPHP. Briefly and very clearly about the basic principles of software design.
• Bottleneck Analysis - Slides of a huge and very useful bottleneck analysis report all with the same TrueNorthPHP.
• Memcached Caching - And again slides the report with TrueNorthPHP.
• What to expect from Laravel 4 - Screencasts demonstrating the capabilities of the upcoming version of the framework.
• PHP + Apache Stack vs Node.js - As the author says: “This is a comparison of apple and orange.” And, nevertheless, the article considers the strengths and weaknesses of PHP and Node.js, as well as provides recommendations in which cases, which technology is preferable.
• Multilanguage on Symfony2 - This article shows how to organize multilanguage support using Symfony2 components. There is also a translation
• Bower and Symfony2 - So, you can use Composer to manage dependencies in PHP, but what about the front-end libraries and their dependencies? Use Bower. This short article is about using Bower in Symfony2.
• Clean Development , 2 , 3 , 4 - A series of articles on 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 / closure - Another look at SOLID , namely the letter "O" - the principle of openness / closure. The author demonstrates the effective application of the principle by creating a class that renders HTML.
• Symfony Live London 2012 - SensioLabs provides video recordings of reports from a conference in London. Reports not only about Symfony, but also about Silex, Composer, Drupal.
• Get to know REST on Zend Framework 2 - A detailed tutorial that describes an example of creating a RESTful application on ZF2.
• Exceptions - The article discusses how you can use exception handling better.
• Continuous Deployment with Symfony2, Jenkins and Capifony - An excellent post in which the author shows how he configured Capifony and Jenkins to organize continuous deployment of the application on Symfony2. A full example deployment script is included.
• Building neural networks in php using FANN, implementation example - An interesting post on Habré about using neural networks in PHP using the example of text language recognition.

CMS / CMF

• Typical development mistakes for WordPress - This post discusses the mistakes that developers make most often and gives recommendations on how to avoid them.
• Joomla 3.0.2 is available - Maybe someone skipped this news, but at the end of September a new major version of the popular CMS was released with many innovations. 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 available only to WordPress.com users.
  • Auto Upload Images - automatically uploads images from external resources to the media library of your site.
  • Safe Report Comments - gives visitors to your site the opportunity to complain about comments.
  • Co-Authors Plus - allows you to specify multiple authors for each post, page or post of a custom type.
  • 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 email to enter your WordPress site.
  • Quttera Web Malware Scanner - detects malicious code, exploits, obfuscated JavaScript and other suspicious activity on your site.
  • Sharexy is a powerful sharing widget.
  • WordPress Download Manager - helps you manage, track 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 Gravatar high resolution.
  • 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.
  
  

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