Hi everyone,
If you're curious about what's new from the world of Php, then you've come to the right place. In this week's newsletter we have all the details on what's new in PHP 8.5, we also have this year's report on the state of php that was gathered from the from the Developer Ecosystem Survey 2025. In Podcasts we have new episodes from Laravel News and this week they chat about New Forge and simple metrics. Php Architect has the 7th episode of Alive and Kicking with Steve McDougall, while The Changelog talks about the science behind developer flow states. Finally in our Reading section we have articles on effortless data mapping in Symfony, Masteric caching architectures, and Modernizing PHPDoc array annotations with Reactor.
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
What's New in PHP 8.5
PHP 8.5 will be released next month on November 20th, 2025, and will feature the Pipe operator, a new URI extension, new array_first() and array_last() functions, and more.
Laravel APP_KEY vs Password Hashing: What Every Developer Should Know About Encryption & Hashing.
I have been developing solutions with the Laravel framework for a while now, but I have little idea of how encryption works in detail.
Clean Architecture in a Laravel project
“Clean Architecture” is a project structure first mentioned by Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob).
Level Up Your Validations: Pro Techniques for the Symfony Validator
We often associate the Validator component with one primary task: validating entities bound to forms. It’s the trusty gatekeeper that ensures NotBlank, Email, and Length constraints are met before our data hits the database.
Laravel Best Practices That Separate Beginners from Professionals
Writing code is easy. Writing clean, maintainable, and production-ready Laravel code is what separates professionals from beginners.
Symfony 7.4 is Coming! Your New LTS Bridge to 8.0
Hey, folks! Guess what? Symfony 7.4 LTS — biggest, safest upgrade is coming! The final minor release in any Symfony branch is always the crucial moment where awesome new features meet enterprise stability. It’s the release that truly matters for long-term production stability.
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Tutorials and Talks
Boosting App Speed with Flexible Caching - Laravel In Practice EP8
Your cache is fast, but users still hit slow responses when it expires. What if you could serve instant responses even with stale data while Laravel refreshes the cache in the background? Enter Laravel 12's game-changing flexible caching.
How to Set Up & Use Laravel Telescope for Debugging and Monitoring
Ever wondered what’s happening behind the scenes in your Laravel app? Laravel Telescope gives you full visibility into requests, database queries, exceptions, jobs, mail, notifications, and more.
Building High-Performance Secp256k1 ECDSA for PHP: 2,987 Faster
PHP is rarely used for blockchain applications, and for good reason: pure PHP implementations of secp256k1 ECDSA operations are prohibitively slow.
Supercharge your Laravel API calls with Http::pool()
Did you know you can send multiple HTTP requests in parallel in Laravel, instead of one after another?
Building a Production-Ready PHP REST API Framework (Open Source)
After building and managing 25+ enterprise applications (ERP, HRM, CRM, LMS, SaaS), I realized most PHP frameworks are powerful but heavy for small, API-only or microservice projects.
Check If a String is Valid JSON in PHP
There may be times when we need to validate whether a given string is valid JSON. This is especially important when dealing with user input or data from external sources, where the format may not be guaranteed.
Automating MySQL Backups and Imports in Laravel with Artisan Commands
Managing database backups manually can be error-prone and time-consuming — especially across environments.
Type-Safe Domain Models: Building Architectural Integrity with PHPStan & Psalm
In this article, we’ll explore how PHPStan and Psalm — two powerful static analysis tools — can help you enforce architectural integrity, detect invariant violations, and future-proof your domain.
Mastering Try-Catch in PHP: A Complete Guide to Exception Handling
In this comprehensive tutorial, we’ll explore try-catch blocks in PHP, understand how they work, and learn best practices for handling exceptions like a pro. |
News and Announcements
The State of PHP 2025
The State of PHP 2025 examines how developers use, prefer, and rely on PHP, showing how this long-standing web language continues to modernize through new frameworks, improved tooling, and AI-assisted workflows.
Support for Closures in Constant Expressions in PHP 8.5
PHP 8.5 introduces support for closures in constant expressions, making it possible to define a default attribute value as a Closure, among other use-cases. The RFC introduction explains what this means from the PHP language perspective.
Failover Queue Driver in Laravel 12.34
The Laravel team released version 12.34.0 this week, introducing a failover queue driver, full-text database search improvements in Laravel Scout, deferring an HTTP client batch, and more.
PHP 8.5 Introduces a New URI Extension
PHP 8.5 introduces a new URI extension, which is a standards-compliant parser "for both RFC 3986 and the WHATWG URL standard as an always-available part of its standard library within a new 'URI' extension."
October 13–19, 2025: A Week of Symfony #981
This week, Symfony kept fixing bugs and refining the new features for the upcoming Symfony 7.4 and 8.0 releases. Meanwhile, we unveiled a special site to celebrate Symfony's 20th anniversary, and we published the first post in the New in Symfony 7.4 series.
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Podcasts and Vlogs
Laravel News Podcast: New Forge, Composer Setup, and Simple Metrics
Jake and Michael discuss all the latest Laravel releases, tutorials, and happenings in the community.
The Stack Overflow: Open source is giving you choices with your agent systems
Ryan welcomes John Dickerson, CEO of Mozilla.ai, to talk about the evolving landscape of AI agents, the role of open source in keeping the tech ecosystem healthy.
Software Engineering Radio: SE Radio 690: Florian Gilcher on Rust for Safety-Critical Systems
Florian Gilcher, co-founder of Ferrous Systems and the Rust Foundation, speaks with host Giovanni Asproni about the application of Rust in mission- and safety-critical systems.
Developer Tea: The Good and Bad of Choosing Measurements - Traps and Opportunities of Measuring What Matters
In this episode, I dive into the management mantra that "what is measured is managed" and explain why this simple assertion often leads to a complex trap.
Shoptalk Show: Ben Frain on Responsive Design
Ben's got an updated edition of his book, Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS, to chat about as well as how much AI is being inserted into writing,
WP Builds: 441 – From developer to educator: Jonathan Bossenger talks about WordPress DevRel
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley talks with Jonathan Bossenger, a developer advocate at Automattic, about his journey into WordPress and developer relations (DevRel).
Laravel Podcast: The Art of Teaching Laravel with Christoph Rumpel
In this episode of the Laravel Podcast, host Matt Stauffer speaks with Christoph Rumpel, a DevRel Engineer at Laravel.
PHP Architect: PHP Alive And Kicking: Episode 7 – Steve McDougall
The Bored Sysadmin Who Chose PHP Over .NET a young Linux sysadmin whose job involves kicking the mail server once a week and spending the rest of the time playing Call of Duty.
Mostly Technical: Sweet Hang #2: Humans Still Required w/ Jeffrey Way
Ian and Aaron are joined this week by Jeffrey Way, creator of Laracasts, to talk about everything from their opinions about JavaScript to the evolution of Laracasts to modeling behavior for your kids and so much more.
Over Engineered: Storing Files in the Database w/ Bogdan Kharchenko and Skyler Katz
Sometimes you have files or other large chunks of data that you need to associate with a record in your database.
Syntax: S-Tier MCP Servers for Developers
Scott and Wes break down the top-tier MCP servers developers are using right now.
The Changelog: The science behind developer flow states
Csaba Okrona lays out exactly what Flow is (then shows you how to engineer your way back to it), a smart vacuum turned against an innocent hacker, Matz and the Ruby core team step up to steward RubyGems, Simon Willison things Claude Skills could be bigger than MCP.
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Effortless Data Mapping in Symfony: A Deep Dive into the ObjectMapper!
Imagine you’re building a modern API with Symfony. You’re meticulous about your architecture, separating concerns with Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) for incoming request payloads and your Doctrine entities for your database persistence.
How Yii MVC Architecture Streamlines Web Application Development
In today’s era of modern web development, building applications with efficiency is very important.
It’s Not About the Badge: The People Behind Certification for Laravel
When we started building Certification for Laravel, the goal was simple: create a fair, community-driven way to measure real Laravel knowledge.
Mastering Caching Architectures for High-Traffic PHP Apps
How layered caching can turn your PHP application into a performance powerhouse — and what happens if you get it wrong.
Level Up Your DTOs: Pro Techniques for the Symfony ObjectMapper
We often reach for tools that solve immediate problems. When it comes to hydrating objects from raw data, many of us see the ObjectMapper component as a simple tool for turning an array into a DTO. A convenient shortcut, but nothing more.
Modernizing PHPDoc Array annotations with Rector
In one of my project, I’m working with Symfony Serializer, phpstan/phpdoc-parser and phpdocumentor/reflection-docblock to handle serialization of complex objects.
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Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
hassanzohdy/mongez
A Robust application handler for building neat laravel application(s).
vysokeskoly/deb-build
Utilities for building deb packages of PHP apps.
kocal/ckfinder-symfony-bundle
CKFinder bundle for Symfony 5+.
staudenmeir/eloquent-eager-limit-x-laravel-adjacency-list
Merge of staudenmeir/eloquent-eager-limit and staudenmeir/laravel-adjacency-list.
kosinix/paginator
A generic PHP class to split large data into smaller chunks for use in web apps.
czim/laravel-filter
Filter for Laravel Eloquent queries, with support for modular filter building.
sylius-labs/sensio-distribution-bundle
Base bundle for Symfony Distributions.
ofaws/ai-response-sanitizer
A Laravel package providing simple methods to sanitize text responses received from ChatGPT or other LLM.
dogado/json-api-server
Abstract server side php implementation of the JSON:API protocol.
moderntribe/coding-standards
The Modern Tribe Coding Standard for PHPCS.
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