Hi everyone,
Php news and updates sent to your inbox weekly. This week, we have articles on Scaling PHP Codebases, Keeping Laravel Projects Findable When Local Work Starts to Sprawl, and The `clamp` Function in PHP 8.6. In Tutorials we have guides to Laravel's First-Party Image Processing, How to White Label the WordPress Admin for Clients, and Common Laravel Errors and How to Fix Them. Finally in our Reading section, we have articles on Building Idempotent Message Handlers in Symfony Messenger, Mastering Domain Services in PHP, and The Case of the Disappearing Free Trial.
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
|
Please help us by clicking to our sponsors:
Give Your Unused Startup a Second Chance
List your unfinished SaaS, app, or project for free. Sell it, find a co-founder, or let someone else bring it to life. No fees, no hassle - just new opportunities!
|
Articles
The `clamp` Function in PHP 8.6
In this article, we're going to take a quick look at what the clamp function is, how you'll be able to use it in PHP 8.6, and how you can achieve similar functionality in earlier versions of PHP.
Shared-Database Multi-Tenancy in Laravel: The Foundation Layer
Shared-database multi-tenancy = one database, every row tagged with tenant_id, a global scope that filters automatically.
Keeping Laravel Projects Findable When Local Work Starts to Sprawl
If you keep more than a handful of Laravel apps on your machine, the real problem is not php artisan serve. It is finding the right project fast enough to stay in flow.
Scaling PHP Codebases: Why Safety and Strictness Come First
When people talk about scale, many think they mean 10000 requests per second. They however forget that scale also means the ease of maintaining the code and adding new features. How quickly can we add a new city? How quickly can we onboard new engineers?
Laravel Sanctum vs Passport: Choosing the Right API Auth
If you're building an API in Laravel, you'll hit this decision in the first week: Sanctum or Passport. The question sounds like a minor package choice, but it forces a bigger one — who consumes this API, and how much trust do you need to broker with them?
How I organize dozens of calculators on a single WordPress site without it turning into a mess
At some point I realized I had built a lot of calculators. Finance, health, construction, DIY, sports — different domains, different logic, different user intents. All living on the same WordPress site.
|
Tutorials and Talks
Building a Live Match Scoreboard With Laravel Reverb
This tutorial is about building the second kind, where a goal appears on every open tab at once without anyone reaching for the refresh button.
Building and Deploying a Laravel App With Claude Code on Zerops
In this video, I build the entire thing without installing a single dev tool on my laptop.
A Practical Guide to Laravel's First-Party Image Processing
Laravel 13.20 introduced first-party image processing via the new Illuminate\Image component in Pull Request #59276. Before this release, resizing an avatar or converting an upload to WebP meant reaching for a package directly.
Why phpMyAdmin migrations break plugin settings — and why `wp search-replace` does not
After a domain migration or HTTPS switch, "all plugin settings are gone" or "Elementor layouts are broken" is a common outcome. The cause, in most cases, is running a string replacement against the WordPress database without accounting for PHP serialized data.
How to White Label the WordPress Admin for Clients (Code and Plugin)
Short answer: to white label the WordPress admin, you rebrand four areas: the login page, the admin bar, the dashboard footer, and the default dashboard widgets. You can do it for free with a few functions.php snippets, or use a white label plugin that turns each of those into a toggle so it scales across client sites.
File Upload Best Practices in Laravel: Validation, Security & Storage
In this guide, we’ll cover production-ready best practices for file uploads in Laravel, spanning validation, secure storage patterns, unique filename generation, and cloud integration.
Getting ready for WordPress 7.0 — three things to check now: PHP requirements, FSE migration, and editor extensions
Five failure patterns from past WordPress major upgrades ended with the observation that "the same structures will recur in some form in the next major (7.0 or 8.0)."
Debug Your PHP App From Your Phone, Through Your AI Assistant
Last month I was at dinner when my phone buzzed with an Inspector alert: an error on one of our own endpoints. The old routine kicks in automatically at that point. Open the dashboard on a screen too small for it, squint at a stack trace, tell yourself "I'll look properly when I’m back at the laptop", and spend the rest of the evening with that specific low grade guilt of knowing something is broken and choosing to do nothing about it.
Common Laravel Errors and How to Fix Them: A Practical Troubleshooting Guide for Every Developer
A big part of development is figuring out why something that worked yesterday suddenly stopped working today.
|
News and Announcements
CakePHP 5.4.0 RELEASED
Improvements: A backwards compatible container implementation has been added to CakePHP. New methods on Collection for working with keys, values, conditional method chaining, and imploding to a string + much more!
Monthly Log Driver in Laravel 13.23
Laravel 13.23 adds a monthly log driver that rotates one file per calendar month, per-message tenant selection for the SES v2 mail transport, support for PostgreSQL's USING clause when changing column types, and a timing-safe comparison for the maintenance mode bypass secret. The Laravel team released v13.23.0 on July 27, 2026.
July 20–26, 2026 - A Week of Symfony #1021
This week, Symfony development activity was very intense and focused mostly on bug fixes. In addition, we added support for the upcoming Twig 4.0 version and fixed some issues related to changes in the upcoming PHP 8.6 version. Lastly, we published the first talks for the SymfonyCon Warsaw 2026 conference.
This Week In PHP Internals | July 22, 2026
2 ballot boxes open and both lopsided — Duration cruising at 23 to 1, minimum versions right behind it; gd 2.4 arriving 4 days after the door closed and pointing at the next release instead; a pipe operator with 2 authors claiming 1 token; typed arrays proposed, revised, and shelved inside 5 days; and the deprecations list armed with its evidence file, ballots opening Monday — with readonly defaults and const-property-write queued right behind. Thanks again to Tideways.com for supporting this week's episode.
SymfonyCon Warsaw 2026 The first 4 speakers are live!
The Call for Papers is officially closed, and wow... we are blown away by your submissions! Thank you to everyone who submitted a talk or a workshop.
|
Podcasts and Vlogs
Laravel News: Image processing, package creation, and passwordless sign-in
Jake and Michael discuss all the latest Laravel releases, tutorials, and happenings in the community.
The Stack Overflow: You need reliable AI context for your site reliability
Ryan is joined by Asaf Savich, Komodor’s AI Engineering Group Manager, to discuss why modern reliability work requires navigating massive cross-service context, what good context engineering actually likes when AI is integrated into site reliability, and how the work of human SREs is shifting towards strategy and AI agent management.
Software Engineering Radio: SE Radio 730: Birgitta Boeckeler on Harness Engineering for AI Agents
Birgitta Boeckeler, a Distinguished Engineer and consultant focused on AI-assisted software delivery at Thoughtworks, joins host Priyanka Raghavan for a deep dive into harnesses for AI agents.
Developer Tea: Using Substition to Make Decisions Simpler
In this episode, Jonathan explores how to take that automatic mental trick and use it on purpose — shrinking weighty, paralysis-inducing decisions down to the small, low-stakes actions they're actually made of.
Shoptalk Show: CodePen 2.0, Templates on the Web, The Year of HTML?
CodePen 2.0 is out now and we're talking about the launch, the idea of templating on the web, and how HTML could look very interesting in the future.
WP Builds: 477 – Classic themes to Block Editor: lessons from a WordPress plugin business
Today were talking about the creation and evolution of the Slidy Panel WordPress plugin, designed to offer customisable slide-in panels for block-based sites.
PHP Architect: The PHP Podcast 2026.07.23
Eric got ousted from his own show (no pants required), Holly’s elephants are lost somewhere in the U.S., and the crew talks SIMD, PHP 8.6 feature freeze, and whether AI can actually create. Also, socks.
Syntax: Open Models Replace Big AI
A huge week for open models: Inkling (the first big US open-weight model since Gemma 4), Qwen 3.8, and Kimi 3 all dropped.
The Changelog: Canary tokens and digital tripwires
Haroon Meer is back! Haroon is the Founder of Thinkst, the ~50-person bootstrapped company behind Canary and Canarytokens — honeypots and tripwires you sprinkle inside your network and forget about until an attacker touches one.
|
|
15 Years of Laravel: Lessons, Mistakes, and Best Practices from Real-World Projects
Over the last 15 years, I've built everything from small business websites to enterprise applications using Laravel. Here are three lessons that have consistently helped me deliver better software.
The Case of the Disappearing Free Trial
A debugging story about WooCommerce Subscriptions, caching red herrings, and one deliberate line of code that quietly broke a conversion funnel.
From 1 Week to 1 Day: The Unsexy Power of Standardization
"Standardization is boring." I've heard this phrase more times than I can count. Usually from senior engineers who've been burned by "one-size-fits-all" solutions. Usually right before they propose building Yet Another Custom Framework™.
File Upload Security in PHP and Laravel — The File That Isn’t What It Claims to Be
Letting users upload files is one of the most dangerous things a PHP application can do. Here is how to do it safely.
Building Idempotent Message Handlers in Symfony Messenger
Imagine this scenario: a Symfony Messenger worker receives PaymentCaptured, creates a merchant payout, and commits the PostgreSQL transaction. The pod disappears before Messenger deletes the message from Amazon SQS.
Clean and Scalable: Mastering Domain Services in PHP
Modern PHP has moved beyond traditional MVC. In 2026, building scalable web applications in PHP requires a domain-centric approach where Domain Services form the backbone of business logic.
|
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
icanboogie/inflector
Multilingual inflector that transforms words from singular to plural, underscore to camel case, and more.
omines/datatables-bundle
Symfony DataTables Bundle with native Doctrine ORM, Elastica and MongoDB support.
craue/formflow-bundle
Multi-step forms for your Symfony project.
rakutentech/laravel-request-docs
Automatically generate Laravel docs from request rules, controllers and routes.
patchlevel/worker
Gives the opportunity to build a stable worker that terminates properly when limits are exceeded.
topthink/think-container
PHP Container & Facade Manager.
lullabot/drainpipe
An automated build tool to allow projects to have a set standardized operations scripts.
echolabsdev/prism
A powerful Laravel package for integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into your applications.
netresearch/typo3-ci-workflows
Centralized dev-dependencies, configs, and CI tooling for Netresearch TYPO3 extensions.
ocramius/doctrine-batch-utils
A set of utilities to operate with Doctrine ORM's batch processing functionality.
|
Jobs
------
Do you have a position that you would like to fill? PHP Weekly is ideal for targeting developers and the cost is only $75/week for an advert. Please let me know if you are interested by emailing me at [email protected] |
Please help us by clicking to our sponsor:
 Protect your PHP Code
Why not try SourceGuardian 17. Click here to download a 14 Day Trial copy. Protect your code using Windows, Linux or Mac and run everywhere with our free Loaders. |
So, how did you like this issue?
|
|
|
|
