Hi everyone,
It's the first issue for the month of July and summer is in full swing in the northern hemisphere. We hope all of you are keeping cool and hydrated. This week we have a beginner friendly guide on Laravel testing, we also have tutorials on input filtering in PHP, how to deploy a Laravel app to a VPS, and defining a dedicated query builder in Laravel with PHP attributes. In Podcasts we have new episodes from the guys at North Meets South and this wee they chat about restrained feature and variable static views. Developer Tea explores using LLMs can be a powerful tool for expanding your skill for career growth, while The Changelog discuss how coding agents have crossed a chasm. Finally in our Reading section we have articles on Laravel 12's validation system, cross-site scripting, and how debugging an API issue in Laravel taught a valuable lesson to one developer.
We have all that and more, so we do hope you enjoy this week's newsletter. If you have an article, tutorial or podcast that you would like to be featured in our newsletter, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected].
All the best,
Adrian
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Articles
Top 6 MySQL Database Management Struggles for Laravel Developers (And Smart Fixes)
You build Laravel apps. You’re good at writing features and shipping updates, but when something goes wrong with MySQL, it can be a very different story.
PHP version stats: June, 2025
Welcome back to another blog post about PHP's version usage across the community. You can read the previous edition here, but I'll also include historic data in this post.
Run Laravel Pint With a Single Keyboard Shortcut in PhpStorm
PhpStorm’s External Tools have been around for ages—perfect for running command-line formatters like Laravel Pint only when you decide.
Design Better Databases - Best Practices
Databases remain the "bread and butter" of software development. Especially PHP developers can attest to this, since PHP is predestined for working with databases.
Laravel Shortcuts: 5 Simple Functions to Speed Up Your Coding Workflow
In this article, we’ll go over 5 simple Laravel functions that can significantly speed up your development process.
Laravel 12.19: Use PHP Attribute for a More Elegant Query Builder
If you’ve ever felt your Eloquent models getting cluttered with query logic — multiple scopes, custom methods, and conditionals — then today’s feature in Laravel 12.19 is for you.
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Tutorials and Talks
Laravel's in_array_keys Rule: Validating Partial Array Keys
Laravel's in_array_keys validation rule provides elegant validation for scenarios where arrays must contain at least one key from a specified set, without requiring all keys to be present.
Enhanced Enum Processing with Laravel's Default Parameter Support
Laravel's request enum handling has been improved with built-in default value support, streamlining enum validation and fallback logic in your applications.
Defining a Dedicated Query Builder in Laravel 12 With PHP Attributes
The Laravel 12.19 release introduced the UseEloquentBuilder PHP attribute to define a custom query builder for your model. Models don't typically need a custom query builder, but you can use this technique to thin out models, group scopes in one central place, and include custom query builder methods you'll reuse in your application.
Building a Task Reminder With Laravel and MongoDB
The popularity of Laravel has improved recently as more developers have started to adopt the technology. Laravel has an easy-to-understand syntax that boosts productivity by letting the developer focus on the core features of their application and not bother with repetitive tasks like authentication and sending emails.
Laravel Testing - A Beginner-Friendly Guide for Developers
In this post, I’ll walk you through the essentials of Laravel testing in a friendly and practical way — including PHPUnit basics, Laravel’s testing structure, and the core testing philosophy like TDD and SUT.
How I Built a Simple Contact Form Plugin for WordPress from Scratch
This is a perfect step-by-step guide for anyone who wants to get started developing plugins and understand how the magic behind WordPress really works.
Mastering Input Filtering in PHP: A Guide to `filter_input` Techniques
Handling user input securely is a cornerstone of web development. PHP offers a powerful function called filter_input that simplifies input validation and sanitization.
Difference Between Helper Functions and Traits in PHP (Laravel)
In this article, we’ll clearly explain the differences, use cases, and real-world examples of both so you’ll know when to use each.
How to Deploy a Laravel Application to a VPS: Complete Step-by-Step Guide
In this guide, you'll learn how to deploy Laravel from GitHub to a VPS using the LEMP stack (Linux, Nginx, MySQL, PHP). |
News and Announcements
Symfony 7.3.1 & Symfony 7.2.8 released
Read the Symfony upgrade guide to learn more about upgrading Symfony and use the SymfonyInsight upgrade reports to detect the code you will need to change in your project.
June 23–29, 2025 - A Week of Symfony #965
This week, Symfony 6.4.23, 7.2.8 and 7.3.1 maintenance versions were released. Meanwhile, the upcoming Symfony 7.4 version continued adding new features such as better controller helpers, more precision in UUIDv7 values, and using PHP serialization instead of XML for dumping the container in debug/lint commands.
CakeFest tickets available NOW!
Use code: CakePHPX for discounted early pricing. Ready to book your stay? Crowne Plaza is offering a discounted rate for attendees.
Laravel Live Denmark, Copenhagen August 21-22, 2025
Join us and 300 other Laravel and PHP enthusiasts from around the world got for two days of learning, 16 speakers and more within the Laravel community.
PHP Conference Kansai 2025 - Date: July 18 - 19, 2025 | Kobe, Japan.
PHP Conference Kansai is a large-scale technical conference in Japan for PHP engineers to share their technical knowledge and experiences in and around PHP.
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Podcasts and Vlogs
The Stack Overflow: Programming problems that seem easy, but aren't, featuring Jon Skeet
Jon Skeet, the first Stack Overflow user with a million reputation, sits down with Ryan to share his wealth of knowledge on all things development.
North Meets South Podcast: Flavours of busy, restrained features, and variable static views
In this episode, Jake and Michael discuss the nuance of being “busy”, saying no to features (and why), handling user feedback early, Laravel-powered static views with dynamic data, and building tools that stand the test of time.
Maintainable Podcast: Joel Chippindale: Why High-Quality Software Isn’t About Developer Skill Alone
CTO coach Joel Chippindale joins Robby to share what he's learned over two decades of building and leading software teams. Joel argues that maintainability has less to do with “clean code” and more to do with how teams communicate, prioritize, and make progress visible.
Software Engineering Radio: SE Radio 675: Brian Demers on Observability into the Toolchain
Brian Demers, Developer Advocate at Gradle, speaks with host Giovanni Asproni about the importance of having observability in the toolchain.
Developer Tea: Using LLMs To Expand Your Working Vocabulary
This episode explores the fundamental mindset of building your vocabulary, extending beyond literal words to conceptual understanding and mental models, and how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be a powerful tool for expanding and refining this crucial skill for career growth, clarity, and navigating disruptions.
Shoptalk Show: Naming Consistency, HTML Includes, and Mixins
Chris reflects on CSS Day in Amsterdam, allowing languages to grow with nonstandard elements, naming things continues to be hard, shapes are going to get weird on the web, HTML includes get stirred up, thoughts on CSS mixins, and Dave's blogging about resizing text fun.
WP Builds: 426 – Why Independent Analytics could be the WordPress alternative to Google Analytics you’ve been waiting for
In this episode, I talk with Ben Sibley and Andrew Mead, creators of the Independent Analytics WordPress plugin. We discuss how the plugin offers privacy-focused, GDPR-compliant analytics entirely within your WordPress dashboard, no external servers, tracking, or cookies involved.
PHP Architect: The PHP Podcast: 2025.06.26
This week on the PHP Podcast, Eric and John talk about Happy Birthday PHP, PHP Tek 2026 CTF Opened, Quirks in PHP, Laminas MVC Retiring, and more.
Mostly Technical: 89: Money Mindset
Ian and Aaron talk about what’s new with Outro.fm, why Aaron suddenly has an embarrassment of Mac hardware riches, and what’s new with Aaron after last week’s dramatic episode.
Over Engineered: Fostering Community w/ Alex Hillman
Alex Hillman has been thinking about and actively supporting communities for decades. In this episode, Chris and Alex talk about lessons he's learned along the way that can help meetup organizers tend their local tech communities, and brainstorm about ways that we can organize together to support meetups in general.
Syntax: $200mo Background Agents, CLI Tooling and “Max Mode”
AI coding agents are getting wild. Scott and Wes break down the latest tools that run in the background, write code across multiple steps, and charge you $200 a month to do it.
The Changelog: Coding agents have crossed a chasm
David Singleton says coding agents have crossed a chasm, Anton Zaides explains how SWEs should approach the “squeeze”, Mat Duggan has ideas for Kubernetes 2.0, Sean Goedecke does a nice job elucidating the coding agent commoditization, and one more good reason to write, even though it’s hard.
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My Unexpected Bug Hunt: How Debugging a Weird API Issue in Laravel Taught Me More Than Docs Ever Could
Pull up a chair, because I just survived one of those bug hunts — the kind that makes you question your entire career choice but also ends up teaching you something new and, somehow, feels oddly satisfying.
Mastering Laravel 12 Conditional Validation
Laravel 12’s validation system is a powerhouse for ensuring data integrity in web applications. One of its standout features is conditional validation, which allows you to apply validation rules based on the values of other fields.
Laravel for SaaS: How to Keep Multi-Tenant Data Safe
Building a SaaS app with Laravel is incredibly rewarding — the framework’s elegance lets you move fast and build robust features. But when your app serves multiple tenants (customers), data security becomes mission critical.
Efficient Reporting: Query Caching and Big Data Report Generation with Queues
Today, let’s discuss a real-world problem every backend developer faces at some point – optimizing heavy reports.
Client Concurrent Requests with Symfony: How We Passed from 40 Minutes to 10 Minutes Fetching APIs
Ever faced the challenge of processing vast amounts of API data efficiently? We recently tackled this exact problem, transforming what was a data-fetching marathon into a blazing fast sprint.
Cross-Site Scripting with a Twist
In this blog post, we will focus on analyzing and exploiting $_SERVER variables, focusing on the $_SERVER[‘PHP_SELF’] one.
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Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
aws/aws-sdk-php-v3-bridge
A compatibility pack for using Amazon SimpleDB with v3 of the AWS SDK for PHP.
j3rrey/wsdl2phpgenerator
Simple class library for generating php classes from a wsdl file.
hvlucas/laravel-logger
Log Model events easily with laravel-logger! Package is NOT LIVE yet.
jeffersonsimaogoncalves/cakephp-fractal-transformer-view
CakePHP view builder utilizing Fractal library for entities transformation.
rohitkundale/order-comment
Allows customer to add a special note/message/comment or instruction while placing an order.
diablomedia/browser-age
Show release date of user's browser based on parsed properties from useragent.
brandonbest/php-unittest-sqlite
Limit the number of migrations/seeders run during unit tests.
sfynx-project/tool-migration-bundle
This Bundle provides a command to execute migration with a versionning system like doctrine migration.
idci/barcode-bundle
Symfony2 Barcode Generator Bundle using Twig function extension.
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