Hi everyone,
Have you ever thought about the number of websites that exist on the internet? You're in luck because this week one of our subscribers submitted an article that provide that data, and more (also, the answer is 1.43 billion websites). You can find it in our Reading section this week, along with articles on Mastering Agentic Workflows, and Vectors, Dimensions, and Feature Spaces — The Geometry Behind Machine Learning, which was also submitted by one of our readers. In Podcasts this week we also have new episodes from No Compromises, and this week they ask: Do you actually own the code you ship? North Meets south talks about Unused APIs, Passport testing traps, and local AI bottlenecks, while Building the Business Side of Laravel is the topic of the week for the guys at Laravel Podcast. Finally in Tutorials, we have guides on PHP Authentication System, Processing Supplier and Marketplace XML Feeds in PHP, and PrestaShop Behind a Load Balancer: What Breaks and How to Fix It.
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
PHP's biggest problem
The language itself is solid. The ecosystem is incredibly rich. Tooling has seen significant growth in the past decade. The Foundation ensures sustainable development. AI adoption is high compared to other languages (possibly to the vast amounts of online PHP code that models are trained on). Design by committee isn't ideal, but still the language continues to evolve — so even that is not the issue.
Stop Subscribing to Domain Events
You have a wallet balance projection. It listens to MoneyWasAdded and MoneyWasWithdrawn, computes the current balance, and writes it to a read model table. A notification service pushes a WebSocket update whenever a user's balance changes.
6 Things We Learned the Hard Way About Laravel Performance in Real Projects
In this article, I'll share six Laravel performance lessons we learned from building real client systems, including how Eloquent queries, caching, code structure, deadlines, and communication affected the way we build and maintain applications.
Using the ADR (Action/Domain/Responder) Pattern in Laravel
In this article, let's understand what the ADR pattern is, why it fits really well in Laravel, and how to apply it with a simple example.
Stop binding Symfony Forms to your entities
It starts innocently. You have an entity, you have a form, and Symfony makes it so easy to connect the two.
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Tutorials and Talks
PrestaShop Behind a Load Balancer: What Breaks and How to Fix It
PrestaShop on a single server is fine. PrestaShop behind a load balancer with auto-scaling nodes — that's where the fun begins. The framework was never built for this, and it shows.
PHP returning 500 HTTP Error on a parked domain
I have a Laravel application running on my primary domain, mainapp.com. The Laravel public/ folder is symlinked to a subfolder in the document root, and a custom .htaccess routes everything through it.
CoffeeTime – PHP Authentication System Tutorial
In this project, I built a simple web application called CoffeeTime using PHP and MySQL. The main goal of this project was to understand how a full authentication system works, including user registration, login, session handling, and logout functionality.
Simple secure login
This is a project done in order to understand login form security.
Running OroCommerce with PHP -s Built-in Server
Guide of running OroCommerce without the overhead of a traditional web server stack. Using the built-in PHP server is a “lean” developer’s dream, provided you handle the routing correctly.
My Laravel App Was Selling the Same Seat Twice — Until I Finally Understood Race Conditions
The bug that cost us money, silently, for three weeks. Here’s how PHP 8.4 and Laravel 13 finally help you put a stop to it.
Processing Supplier and Marketplace XML Feeds in PHP
Build safer PHP import pipelines for supplier and marketplace XML feeds by streaming, filtering, extracting, normalizing, and handing off arrays. |
News and Announcements
The CakeDC users plugin for CakePHP has been updated!
Fix timing-safe comparison for social account token validation using hash_equals().
PHP 8.5.6, PHP 8.2.31 & 8.4.21 Released!
The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 8.5.6, PHP 8.2.31 & 8.4.21. This is a security release.
PhpStorm 2026.2 Early Access Program Has Started
The Early Access Program (EAP) for the next major PhpStorm 2026.2 release is now open!
Laravel's AI SDK adds sub-agents
Laravel's AI SDK now lets you hand off agents as tools to other agents, turning the SDK into a proper orchestration layer.
Queue-Wide Inspection Methods in Laravel 13.8.0
Laravel v13.8.0 adds methods for inspecting jobs across all queues in a single call, plus new worker pause/resume events, assertSessionMissingInput() for testing, SortDirection enum support in the query builder, and more.
Symfony 8.1.0-BETA1 released
This is a pre-release version of Symfony 8.1. If you want to test it in your own applications before its final release.
Symfony 6.4.38 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.
May 4–10, 2026 - A Week of Symfony #1010
This week, Symfony 6.4.38, 7.4.10, and 8.0.10 maintenance versions were released. In addition, we published the first beta of Symfony 8.1 so you can test it before its final release in three weeks. Meanwhile, we shared more information about the SymfonyDay Montreal 2026 conference and started publishing the New in Symfony 8.1 blog series.
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Podcasts and Vlogs
The Stack Overflow: Connecting the dots for accurate AI
At HumanX, Ryan is joined by Philip Rathle, CTO at Neo4j to discuss what knowledge context means for AI agents, how limitations like stale training data make the model-only approach to agents a bad fit for enterprise environments.
No Compromises Podcast: Do you actually own the code you ship?
In the latest episode of the No Compromises podcast, we discuss whether developers still care about understanding the code they ship, or whether that expectation is becoming a relic of the past.
North Meets South Podcast: Unused APIs, Passport testing traps, and local AI bottlenecks
In this episode, Michael shares details from a major internal platform shift at work, including the decision to completely remove an underused public JSON API and rebuild integrations around real customer needs instead of hypothetical use cases.
Software Engineering Radio: SE Radio 719: Birol Yildiz on Building an Agentic AI SRE
Birol Yildiz, CEO and co-founder of iLert, joins host Kanchan Shringi to explore how iLert built an AI SRE — an autonomous agent for handling production incidents — and what the experience revealed about building AI agents in the real world.
Shoptalk Show: 714: Camping, Burnout, and Chris’ CSS Talk
How responsible should you be for fixing your own website for others, Dave's got a blacklog of blog posts, Chris got a camper van, debating burnout even when you love your work, a weekly AI doomer check in, and Chris has a talk for Smashing Magazine happening by the time you hear this.
WP Builds: 467 – Exploring Goose Commerce, a new Elementor based AI eCommerce solution
Nathan Wrigley interviews Giles Beckley, creator of WP Goose (Goose Commerce), a new WordPress e-commerce plugin designed natively for Elementor with a unique desktop app and built-in AI functionality.
Laravel Podcast: Building the Business Side of Laravel with Tom Crary
In this episode, Matt Stauffer talks with Tom Crary, President and COO at Laravel, about the path that took him from a Big Four CPA firm to running the business side of one of the most loved frameworks in PHP.
PHP Architect: The PHP Podcast 2026.05.07
PHP Tek Is 11 Days Away — And Everyone Is Stressed The conference countdown is real: 11 days, 10 hours, and a handful of seconds on the clock.
Mostly Technical: 131: Crush My Competitors
Ian and Aaron talk about what's cooking with Solo, why Aaron's hiring his first full-time employee, Ian's frustrations with moving the team to Codex, and a feel good AI story.
Syntax: Skills Skills Skills
Scott and Wes chat all things agent skills for web developers, sharing their favorites for everything from CSS animations and HTML generation to logo extraction, marketing copy, and video creation.
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Vectors, Dimensions, and Feature Spaces — The Geometry Behind Machine Learning
As PHP developers, it’s especially important to understand this intuitively rather than formally, because in code you’ll deal not with abstract linear algebra, but with arrays of numbers, matrices, and operations on them.
Mastering Agentic Workflows in PHP: Behind The Scenes Of Developer Contributions
The first time I saw the notification for a new issue in the Neuron AI repository, I felt that familiar mix of excitement and mild anxiety that every maintainer knows well.
Laravel storage:link Not Working on cPanel? Images Missing After Deploy
I recently deployed a Laravel project to shared hosting using cPanel, and suddenly all uploaded images disappeared.
Service Layer vs Action Pattern vs Jobs in Laravel
One request checks stock, calculates totals, writes the order, sends email, syncs a CRM, and maybe calls Stripe. It works for a while. Then the next feature lands, and the controller starts looking like a drawer full of cables.
Clean Code and Best Practices in PHP
Guide adapted from personal experience and the references listed at the end of this document.
How Many Websites Are There in 2026? (Updated periodically)
The short answer: approximately 1.43 billion websites exist on the internet as of March 2026 — but only around 201 million of them are actually active.
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Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
TrueFramework v4.1
A Small, Batteries-Included PHP Framework Better Exception for PHP 8.5, Improved Email Class, New TaskScheduler, and Included WebAuthn/FIDO2 Support.
paragonie/csp-builder
Easily add and update Content-Security-Policy headers for your project.
symplify/coding-standard
Set of Symplify rules for PHP_CodeSniffer and PHP CS Fixer.
campaignmonitor/createsend-php
A php library which implements the complete functionality of the Campaign Monitor API.
ichhabrecht/content-defender
Define allowed or denied content element types in your backend layouts.
kartik-v/dependent-dropdown
A multi level dependent dropdown JQuery plugin that allows nested dependencies.
genealabs/laravel-pivot-events
This package introduces new eloquent events for sync(), attach(), detach() or updateExistingPivot() methods on BelongsToMany relation.
goldspecdigital/oooas
An object oriented approach to generating OpenAPI specs, implemented in PHP.
zenstruck/bytes
Parse, manipulate, humanize, and format bytes.
spatie/php-cloneable
A trait that allows you to clone readonly properties in PHP 8.1.
api-platform/schema-generator
Various tools to generate a data model based on Schema.org vocables.
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Jobs
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