Hi everyone,
Weekly php news and updates delivered to your inbox is our promise and this week is no exception. We have articles on PHP Fibers, The Best Laravel SaaS Architecture, and Migrating a PHP monolith in production. In Tutorials we have guides on How to build a reactive SPA, Laravel AI Integration, and What is ECA in Drupal — And Why You Should Know It. Finally in our Podcast section we have new episodes from No Compromises and this week they ask if you actually need a multi-tenancy package? Laravel Podcasts chat about Design Engineering at Laravel with Jason Beggs, while the guys at Syntax talk about Writing Maintainable CSS.
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
Laravel job debouncing works better when urgency has its own lane
Laravel debounced jobs are great when the newest state is all you care about. They are dangerous when you use them to collapse events that only look similar from far away.
Migrating a PHP monolith in production: how I think about it
TL;DR — A security breach took down a site running on a 10-year-old Debian server with an obsolete LAMP stack. No access to the original infrastructure, no time to understand it. This is what I did, in what order, and why. The system is still in production. The migration is still ongoing.
The Best Laravel SaaS Architecture: Scalable Structure for Real-World Projects
This article is not theory. This is a practical Laravel SaaS architecture used in real-world systems.
Who Says PHP Isn't Good Enough for OPC UA?
"PHP? For OPC UA? Come on." If you've ever tried to connect a PHP application to a PLC, a SCADA system, or any industrial device, you've probably heard that line. Maybe you said it yourself, opening a browser and searching for a library that didn't exist. That time is over.
5 Modern PHP Features You Should Start Using Today
If you’re still writing PHP like it's 2015, you're missing out on some powerful features that make your code cleaner, safer, and easier to maintain.
PHP Fibers: simplifying async code and speeding up development
How serialization overhead, a surprise OpenSSL upgrade, and idle workers pushed us toward PHP 8.1 Fibers, and what changed when we did.
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Tutorials and Talks
Ship AI with Laravel: RAG with Embeddings and pgvector in Laravel 13
Our agent can look up orders, classify tickets, and remember conversations. But ask it "what's your return policy for damaged items?" and it makes something up. The agent has no access to our actual policies.
Build Custom Middleware for Query Performance Monitoring and Optimization in Laravel with MongoDB
Performance issues can be one of the most challenging to solve in real-world applications because they are not bugs. Performance issues often hide in database queries, leading to situations where the application works but just does not perform great.
How to build a reactive SPA without writing a single line of React or Vue. Part #1
For the last decade, the web development industry has been dominated by a singular architectural pattern - the Single Page Application (SPA). The recipe was standard — build a JSON API (perhaps with API Platform, Laravel or Express) and consume it with a heavy JavaScript framework like React, Vue or Angular.
Develop a Pure PHP Face Recognition Application
This guide walks you through using Dlib models in PHP to perform face detection, identify facial landmarks, and generate face embeddings.
How to Self-Host WordPress Plugins on GitHub and Deliver Updates
In this guide, I'll walk you through a simple yet powerful solution that adheres to WordPress's standard for updates, making the process completely transparent for your users.
Stop Using `env()` in Runtime Code
The Symptoms: Jobs fail randomly. API calls return 401 Unauthorized.
Laravel AI Integration: A Production-Ready Architecture Guide (OpenAI vs Gemini vs Claude)
This guide does not walk you through any provider’s authentication flow. It gives you the system-level map: the problem space, the architectural patterns that address it, a clear-eyed comparison of OpenAI, Gemini, and Claude, and a decision framework you can put in front of your team before the next kickoff.
What is ECA in Drupal — And Why You Should Know It
If you've been building Drupal sites, you've probably written custom modules just to send an automated email or build a simple approval flow. What if you didn't have to? That's what ECA is for. |
News and Announcements
Announcing Plans for a PHP Ecosystem Survey and Report
This year, The PHP Foundation, in collaboration with PhpStorm, a JetBrains IDE, will release an official ecosystem report with data-driven insights into the current state and the future of PHP development.
Polyscope for Windows is Now Available
Polyscope is now available for Windows, bringing the same app and architecture as the macOS version to Windows users.
PHPverse 2026 Returns June 9th
JetBrains PHPverse 2026 is returning on June 9th, bringing together PHP developers worldwide for a free online event. The conference runs from 11:00 to 17:50 UTC and features talks from prominent voices across the PHP ecosystem.
LLPhant: A PHP Generative AI Framework Inspired by LangChain
LLPhant is a PHP library for building Generative AI applications in PHP. Created by Maxime Thoonsen, it provides a unified interface for working with multiple LLM providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, LM Studio, and Ollama.
Debounceable Queued Jobs in Laravel 13.6.0
Laravel v13.6.0 introduces debounceable queued jobs — when the same job is dispatched multiple times within a time window, only the last dispatch executes.
Laravel API Starter Kits Are Coming Soon!
Laravel API starter kits are officially on the way. On the Laravel livestream, Leah and Wendell fielded the question the community keeps asking — "When do we get an API starter kit?" — and Wendell confirmed he's been working on exactly that.
April 20–26, 2026- A Week of Symfony #1008
This week, SymfonyCasts announced a new course on Doctrine inheritance. In addition, we published the schedule for the SymfonyDay Montreal 2026 conference. Lastly, we continued polishing the new features of the upcoming Symfony 8.1 version, ahead of its release in five weeks.
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Podcasts and Vlogs
The Stack Overflow: Your LLM issues are really data issues
Ryan welcomes Harsha Chintalapani, co-founder and CTO at Collate and co-creator of Open Metadata, to the show to discuss why AI and LLMs struggle with real-time, structured production data.
No Compromises Podcast: Do you actually need a multi-tenancy package?
In the latest episode of the No Compromises podcast, we discuss how to evaluate multi-tenancy needs before committing to an architectural approach.
North Meets South Podcast: Gents on Gent with David Hemphill
Michael and Jake are joined by David Hemphill to discuss David's macOS app Gent, a task runner built on the "Ralph loop" pattern for AI-powered coding workflows.
Software Engineering Radio: SE Radio 717: Eric Tschetter on Decoupling Observability
In this episode, host Amey Ambade sits with Eric Tschetter, co-founder of Apache Druid and Chief Architect at Imply, to dissect the critical move toward Decoupling Observability.
Shoptalk Show: Lazy Loading the Web with Scott Jehl
Chris Coyier and Scott Jehl discuss the recent advancements in lazy loading on the web, the process of standardization, browser support, and the future of web performance optimization.
WP Builds: 465 – Creating interactive experiences in WordPress with the Tilbuci plugin
In this episode, Nathan interviews Lucas Santos Junqueira from Brazil, about his innovative tool and WordPress plugin, Tilbuci (pronounced “Chabousi”). The plugin enables users to create interactive, animated “movies” inside the WordPress dashboard, similar to museum exhibits or advanced infographics.
Laravel Podcast: Design Engineering at Laravel: Jason Beggs on Building Laravel Cloud
Matt Stauffer talks with Jason Beggs, staff software engineer at Laravel and the design engineer behind the Laravel Cloud front end. Jason shares how he unexpectedly became “the Tailwind guy”—and how that path led him to helping build one of the most talked-about products in the PHP world.
PHP Architect: The PHP Podcast 2026.04.23
Eric and John return to the podcast after a few weeks away, discussing everything from Disneyland trips and bowling tournaments to EAV database nightmares, editor wars (Vim vs. PHPStorm), AI coding tools, and the state of in-person PHP community events.
Mostly Technical: 129: The Bounds of My Pettiness
Ian and Aaron discuss how Aaron wants to destroy (?) Solo's competitors (!), using AI to find security holes in your app, delaying Token Town until May, and more.
Syntax: Writing Maintainable CSS
Scott and Wes break down what makes CSS truly manageable—from preventing style leaks and embracing fluid layouts to choosing the right methodology, whether that's utility CSS, component-scoped styles, or CSS modules.
The Changelog: Exploring with agents
Today on the show I’m talking with Amelia Wattenberger — designer, data-viz veteran, ex-GitHub Next, and now designing Intent at Augment Code.
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The PHP Criticism You've Never Actually Thought Through
This article goes through the serious criticisms of PHP — stdlib inconsistency, the stateless model, no real async — and where each one actually holds up, and where it doesn't.
The Orphaned ID Bug from My First Job (And What It Taught Me About Being a Junior Dev)
About two weeks into my first web-dev job, I had a Trello card that said the LMS was sometimes leaving orphaned IDs behind when assigned trainings were finished or deleted.
Elegant Ways to Distribute Commercial Laravel Source Code Without Sacrificing Developer Experience
Many development teams struggle with the challenges of software distribution architecture.
Stop Using These Bad PHP Practices in 2026
A senior developer’s honest guide to the PHP habits that are quietly killing your codebase — and what to do instead.
Part-2 — Everything Useful You Can Put in Laravel’s AppServiceProvider.
We’ve already covered six ways to turn the AppServiceProvider from a forgotten file into a central hub for your application. But why stop there?
Stop gluing strings together like it’s 2008, use Symfony String
You know the codebase. You’ve seen it. Maybe you’ve written parts of it. There’s a StringHelper somewhere with a slugify() method that someone wrote in 2019.
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Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
icecave/repr
A library for generating string representations of any value, inspired by Python's reprlib library.
ackintosh/ganesha
PHP implementation of Circuit Breaker pattern.
tightenco/duster
Automatic configuration for Laravel apps to apply Tighten's standard linting & code standards.
santigarcor/laratrust
This package provides a flexible way to add Role-based Permissions to Laravel.
spatie/laravel-validation-rules
A set of useful Laravel validation rules.
kartik-v/yii2-widget-activeform
Enhanced Yii2 active-form and active-field with full bootstrap styling support (sub repo split from yii2-widgets).
ryangjchandler/laravel-cloudflare-turnstile
A simple package to help integrate Cloudflare Turnstile.
pixelfear/composer-dist-plugin
Downloads distributable assets to be used in packages so you don't have to commit them.
winzou/state-machine
A very lightweight yet powerful PHP state machine.
rennokki/laravel-eloquent-query-cache
Adding cache on your Laravel Eloquent queries' results is now a breeze.
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