Hi everyone,
We're back to bring you the latest news and updates on everything PHP. We hope you all had time to take a break to recharge for the new year. Here's wising that this year will be better than the last. This week's newsletter is all about forecasts, predictions and recaps of the year that went by.
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
Partial Function Application is coming in PHP 8.6
Ever reach for a simple callback and end up writing a tiny novella—an arrow function stuffed with types, reordered parameters, and boilerplate just to pass one value through?
A Small PHP Tip That Saves Time (and Lines of Code)
This post is a quick, practical PHP tip about classes and constructors that can make your code cleaner, shorter, and easier to read.
Laravel Service Container: From Dependency Hell to Clean Code
How I transformed my tightly-coupled Laravel app into a testable, maintainable codebase using the Service Container pattern.
Why Your WordPress Site is Slow (Even on "Fast" Hosting)
You did everything right. You bought the premium "Turbo" hosting plan, you installed a caching plugin, and you even compressed your images until they were blurry. Yet, your WordPress site still crawls.
Modern PHP Development: Best Practices for Today
PHP has evolved dramatically in recent years. PHP 8.x brings powerful features that enable cleaner, more performant code. This guide covers modern PHP practices that every developer should know.
Multithreading in PHP: Looking to the Future
Within RFC TrueAsync 1.7 the question arises: how will the proposed RFC interact with possible future changes in PHP core? Having at least a sense of where PHP might go is key to designing the language well for many years. That is why this article exists.
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Tutorials and Talks
12 Days of Eloquent
Playing with laravel eloquent while singing a holiday song. Let's start by cloning the repo I've got setup for us.
How to Add Settings Pages to WordPress Plugins: A Developer's Guide
This is the second post in our "Mastering WordPress Plugins" series. In this part we will make the words per minute dynamic by adding a setting with the WordPress Setting API , and retrieving it with the WordPress Options API.
The Invisible Wall: Building a Bulletproof Code Quality Pipeline in Laravel
Here is how to set up a modern quality pipeline that catches bugs before they exist.
Building a Modern PHP Microservices Architecture with Docker
Learn how to build a scalable, production-ready microservices system with PHP, Docker, and modern DevOps practices.
How to Handle Validation Errors in Symfony the Right Way
Handling validation errors is something every Symfony API needs — yet it often ends up messy, repetitive, and inconsistent.
Laravel Prompts: Interactive CLI Made Simple
The beauty of Laravel Prompts lies in its simplicity. Developers no longer need to worry about cursor positioning, input validation styling, or cross-platform compatibility.
Strict Comparison in PHP Explained at the Zend Engine Level
While browsing bugs.php.net, I found an interesting ticket. Someone reported a surprising behavior, and I wanted to understand what is happening under the hood—because I think this is a really important concept to understand in PHP internals.
Symfony 7.4: The Ultimate Guide to Modern Invokable Commands
With the advent of Symfony 5 and 6, we saw the introduction of Invokable Commands — a paradigm shift that allowed us to treat commands more like controllers.
Bridging Rust and PHP with whyNot: A Learner’s Journey
When you’re learning a new language, the temptation is to start small: toy projects, simple exercises, maybe a “Hello World” or two. But I’ve always believed the best way to learn is to build something real, something that scratches an itch and forces you to wrestle with the language in practice.
Mastering Multi-Step Forms in Symfony 7.4
It is finally here. After years of relying on third-party bundles, battling with session storage and writing convoluted controller logic to handle “wizards,” Symfony 7.4 has delivered one of the most requested features in the framework’s history: Native Multi-Step Forms. |
News and Announcements
Xdebug Update: November 2025
In this update I explain what happened with Xdebug development in the last month. In the last month, I spent around 28 hours on Xdebug, with 24 hours funded.
Laravel 12.44 Adds HTTP Client afterResponse() Callbacks
The Laravel team released version 12.44, featuring HTTP client callbacks after the response is returned, a TestResponse header assertion method, additional fluent date validation methods, and more.
Laravel News 2025 Recap
We've hand-picked some of the biggest stories at Laravel News and the Laravel community in 2025. This year, we saw huge product and open-source releases from Laravel, including Laravel 12, Laravel Cloud, and more!
Symfony 2025 Year in Review
This post highlights the key accomplishments of the Symfony project in 2025. We are grateful for your continuous support, which helped make 2025 a remarkable year for Symfony.
December 29, 2025 – January 4, 2026 - A Week of Symfony #992
This week, Symfony 6.4.31, 7.3.9, 7.4.3, and 8.0.3 maintenance versions were released. In addition, we published the 2025 year recap blog post to review the main Symfony activity during the last year.
SymfonyUX 2.32.0 released
Symfony UX 2.32.0 introduces the new Toolkit Package, a set of fully customizable UI components, with Shadcn UI as the first available kit. The initial components include Button, Dialog, Field, Card, Pagination, Table, and InputGroup.
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Podcasts and Vlogs
The Stack Overflow: Search engine bots crawled so AI bots could run
Ryan hosts Akamai data scientist Robert Lester on the show to discuss how the growth of AI bots affects internet traffic, the ways these AI bots differ from the original search engine optimization ones, and why you might not want to mitigate AI bots on your websites.
No Compromises Podcast: Why I changed my mind about down migrations
In the latest episode of the No Compromises podcast, we discuss Aaron's surprising reversal on down migrations, a topic we've publicly discussed on this podcast.
Software Engineering Radio: SE Radio 701: Max Guernsey, III and Luniel de Beer on Readiness in Software Engineering
Max Geurnsey III and Luniel de Beer, co-authors of the book Ready: Why Most Software Projects Fail and How to Fix It, discuss the concept of readiness in software engineering with host Brijesh Ammanath.
Developer Tea: Career Growth Accelerator: Going from Autopilot to Purpose
This episode marks the 11th anniversary of the show, and I want to celebrate by continuing our Career Growth Accelerator series.
Shoptalk Show: 696: Predictions for 2026, ADHD Updates, and Holiday Catchup
Catching up on holidays adventures, Dave's year in ADHD land, and our predictions for 2026.
PHP Architect: Community Corner: PHP Framework Interop Group with Larry Garfield
In this episode, Scott talks with Larry Garfield about the PHP Framework Interop Group, what needs it fills in the community, and how it’s impacting us, every day developers.
Mostly Technical: 114: Fight Fire With Fire
Ian and Aaron are dealing with the liminal space of the holiday season, talking about their upcoming trip to San Francisco to see the Laravel AI SDK demo, and making even more predictions for 2026.
Syntax: What’s Going to Happen in Web Dev During 2026
Wes and Scott talk about their bold predictions for web development in 2026, from WebGPU-powered design and modern CSS breakthroughs to JavaScript standards, AI-driven tooling, security risks, the future of frameworks, workflows, and more!
The Changelog: The move faster manifesto
Brian Guthrie lists his seven rules for moving faster in software, Continuous-Claude-v2 is a context management system for Claude Code, Gas Town is Steve Yegge’s multi-agent orchestrator for Claude Code, Paul Dix sees a great engineering divergence in 2026, and Mattias Geniar thinks web development is fun again.
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Eval Testing LLMs in PHPUnit
I shipped a one-line prompt change and broke a feature I didn’t know I needed to check. Cold Call Coach is a sales training app where AI plays prospect personas - the sceptical buyer, the satisfied customer, the gatekeeper.
Beyond the Blog: A Comprehensive Guide to Modern WordPress for Developers
This article explores why WordPress remains a dominant force and how developers can leverage its power in a modern stack.
whereHas() vs whereRelation(): Readability Over Shortcuts
Laravel devs love their shortcuts. Tighter syntax, less boilerplate it's satisfying to trim down a few lines. But let's be honest: just because code is shorter doesn't mean it's better.
Unveiling Symfony 7.4: A New Era for Media Validation and DX
In this article, we will explore the new features of Symfony 7.4, with a special focus on the Video constraint, improved console commands and architectural shifts in the HttpFoundation component.
Building a University Resource Sharing Platform: My Laravel Learning Journey
As part of my software development journey, I'm building the Strathmore Resource Exchange (SRE) - an internal marketplace for university students to share academic resources. Here's what I've learned so far about Laravel development, routing, and file handling.
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Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
littlegiant/silverstripe-security-theme
A theme for the Silverstripe security routes.
laker-ls/yii2-nested-set-menu
Widget creates a menu from nesting set tree.
impresscms/codemirror-integration
Integrates CodeMirror with ImpressCMS.
meanify-co/laravel-helpers
A PHP library with helpers for Laravel.
swaggest/swagger2-schema
Swagger 2.0 schema PHP mappings.
matchory/laravel-mailgun-templates-channel
A Laravel notification channel for Mailgun's templated messages.
orlyapps/laravel-github-changelog
Generates a changelog based on github commits.
hamaka/silverstripe-taskforms
Utility to make Silverstripe tasks more interactive and better looking.
witify/laravel-json-response
Quickly make JSON responses in Laravel.
victor-prdh/recaptcha-bundle
Use Google Recaptcha v2/v3 as form type with Symfony 6.4+, see v1.X for symfony 5.4
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