Hi everyone,
All the news and updates from the PHP community in one newsletter. This week we have articles on Immutability in PHP Beyond readonly, Laravel Concurrency, and PHP for AI? It Makes More Sense Than You Think. In Podcasts we have a new episode from No Compromises, and this week they discuss the many different forms caching takes in a Laravel application and why reaching for the cache facade is not always the answer. Michael and Jake from North Meets South recap Laracon US Boston, from Malaysian food and an undefeated dodgeball run to Laraprom, while Matt Stauffer sits down with Taylor Otwell for a post-Laracon debrief covering the biggest announcements across the Laravel framework on the Laravel Podcast. Finally in our Reading section we have articles on The Bug That Threw No Errors, Your storage format is the one thing you cannot refactor, and Defeating the OFFSET Death Spiral.
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
Immutability in PHP Beyond readonly
PHP's readonly keyword is one of those features that immediately makes code look safer. We can put it on a property or a class, and PHP will stop us from assigning a different value later.
Laravel Concurrency: Atomicity, Transactions, and Locking
Two customers try to purchase a product at exactly the same time. If the application isn't designed for concurrency, both requests might read stock = 1 and both complete the purchase. This is where atomicity, transactions, and locking become important.
Symfony and PHP 8.4: Modernizing Without Rewriting Everything
Upgrading a Symfony application to PHP 8.4 doesn't have to mean rewriting half the codebase.
Verifying a WhatsApp webhook in Laravel: the three silent traps
Three things go wrong when a Laravel application receives WhatsApp webhooks, and each produces a different silent failure.
Laravel Development Process: From Idea to Production
Here's a sequence that shows up in almost every Laravel app that talks to the outside world.
PHP for AI? It Makes More Sense Than You Think
Say "AI" in a room full of developers and a pecking order forms on its own. Python sits at the top, JavaScript gets a seat because somebody has to render the chat window and PHP gets the sympathetic look, the one that says maybe you will catch the next wave.
PHP 8.6 Deprecations: Why Your Logs (and Bill) Will Spike
PHP 8.6’s mass deprecation vote just closed: 35 separate RFCs, most of them passing. Nothing breaks in 8.6 itself: deprecated functions keep working, they just start warning. That’s exactly what teams tend to underestimate, and it’s worth walking through why.
|
Tutorials and Talks
Laravel Image Responses: Serve Resized Images From Routes
Laravel's first-party image API has been good at the write path since 13.20: take an upload, transform it, put it on a disk.
Pause All Laravel Queues During a Deploy
There is a window during most deploys where the code on disk has changed but the workers running against it have not restarted yet.
Build a Complete Padel Court Booking System & Admin Dashboard
In this video, we explore a complete Padel Booking System built with PHP 7.4 Native and MySQLi procedural. Featuring an elegant public landing page, real-time online booking, an advanced admin dashboard with analytics charts, court management, transaction reports with date filters, and responsive DataTables.
Full-Page Edge Caching for Laravel Behind Cloudflare: A Practical Guide
Of every performance optimization we have shipped for Laravel clients — OPcache tuning, query fixes, Redis fragment caching, queue offloading — nothing has come close to the impact of full-page HTML edge caching.
Why exporting support tickets is a security risk and how to fix it local first
When a critical bug, billing dispute, or compliance issue happens, someone on the team inevitably needs to export a support conversation. A security engineer might need the raw thread to investigate a report, or a customer might request an official copy of their history.
Laravel Eloquent ORM (Object-Relational Mapper) Relationships
One-to-One Relationship: users id - integer name - string.
Laravel Database Performance: How to Find and Fix Slow Queries
The first time I noticed a Laravel application becoming slow, I initially looked at the PHP code. The routes were working and nothing obvious appeared to be broken, but some requests were taking much longer than they should.
Rate Limiting in Laravel and PHP — How to Stop Brute Force Before It Starts
Without rate limiting an automated attacker can send far more login attempts than your application should ever accept. Here is how to stop that in plain PHP and Laravel. |
News and Announcements
Pause All Queues and a New artisan dev UI in Laravel 13.25
Laravel 13.25 adds a global pause switch that stops every queue on every connection with one command, replaces the process runner behind artisan dev with a tabbed terminal UI, and lets an Image instance be returned directly from a route. The Laravel team released v13.25.0 on August 11, 2026.
PHP 8.6.0 Beta 1 is available for testing
The PHP team is pleased to announce the first beta release of PHP 8.6.0, Beta 1. This continues the PHP 8.6 release cycle, the rough outline of which is specified in the PHP Wiki.
August 10–16, 2026 - A Week of Symfony #1024
This week, development activity for the upcoming Symfony 8.2 release was very intense: PropertyInfo made accessors and mutators configurable with attributes, HttpFoundation added targeted Cache-Control support conforming to RFC 9213, Console attributes can now use callables for descriptions and help text, Messenger added a concurrency option to process messages in parallel, and Mailer introduced support for rate-limited transports. In addition, we announced the Symfony AI Core Team.
PHP Ambassadors: Six Weeks In
When we launched the PHP Ambassador Program on June 19, 2026, we honestly didn’t know what to expect. We knew the need for something like this was definitely there, and it seemed like something the community would be interested in being a part of. But as they say, “you never know how a thing is going to go, until it goes.”
This Week In PHP Internals | August 12, 2026
The verdict lands on PHP's 35-ballot deprecation vote — list() survives on a flat 23-23 tie — the pipe assignment operator is declined, and PHP 8.6's RFC season closes with readonly property defaults and const object writes locked in. Complete coverage of the php-internals mailing list, August 5 - 11, 2026.
NativePHP v4: Build Native iOS and Android UI in Blade
NativePHP now renders Blade components as real SwiftUI views on iOS and Jetpack Compose views on Android, with no web view or HTML involved.
|
Podcasts and Vlogs
The Stack Overflow: What does an agentic SDLC actually look like?
Ryan welcomes Suneet Malhotra, Senior Manager of Test Engineering at Motorola Solutions, to chat about building end-to-end agentic SDLC pipelines using MCPs, using Cohen’s kappa to evaluate multiple LLMs-as-judges, and how you can improve requirements by shifting QA left through a specification enrichment stage immediately after the design phase.
No Compromises Podcast: Which layer of caching does your slow app actually need?
In the latest episode of the No Compromises podcast, we discuss the many different forms caching takes in a Laravel application and why reaching for the cache facade is not always the answer.
North Meets South Podcast: Lobster rolls, boom parties, and crashed workers
In this episode, Michael and Jake recap Laracon US Boston, from Malaysian food and an undefeated dodgeball run to Laraprom, the great nachos-with-rice debate, conference logistics, Aaron Francis stepping into Laravel’s VP of Marketing and Community role, and a reminder to make room for silly software.
Maintainable Podcast: David Hayes: Boring Software, Clear Incentives, and Better Checklists
Drawing from his experience at PagerDuty, Sentry, and now FusionAuth, he joins Robby to explore what happens when software becomes trusted infrastructure. Their conversation touches on API design, naming things, product management, self-hosted software, and why customers rarely upgrade as quickly as we’d like them to.
Software Engineering Radio: SE Radio 733: Max Corbridge on Securing AI Agents
Max Corbridge, an ethical hacker and red teamer who is co-founder and CEO of Secure Agentics, speaks with SE Radio host Amey Ambade about how AI agents get attacked and what engineers can actually do to defend them.
Developer Tea: A Pragmatic Definition for Accountability
Accountability is a word you'll hear in your performance reviews, from your manager, and increasingly as you step into leadership. It's also one of the most abused and misunderstood concepts in our industry.
Shoptalk Show: 728: BIMI, Good Favicon Practice, and CSS @Layer Exploration
Having type two fun, email branding with BIMI, accessibility details in icons and favicons, using AI as a coding and maintenance partner, CSS @layer property, design systems, and the economics of fast AI hardware.
WP Builds: 480 – Community, uncertainty, and adaptation in the age of AI
The conversation focused on WordPress’s recent market share decline, with data showing a dip from a 36% peak in 2022 to 33% in 2026.
Laravel Podcast: Laravel is a Multilingual Framework, with Taylor Otwell
In this episode, Matt Stauffer sits down with Taylor Otwell for a post-Laracon debrief covering the biggest announcements across the Laravel framework, AI tooling, and Laravel Cloud.
PHP Architect: The PHP Podcast 2026.08.13
Eric and John reunite after weeks apart to talk Laracon in Boston, more diverse voices coming to this time slot, CPX finally giving PHP an npx, a stripped-down PHPStorm Light, and PHP Tek’s extended CFP.
Mostly Technical: 145: Marketing As Engineering
Ian & Aaron discuss what's coming to Solo, how Aaron's running marketing at Laravel, why Ian swears by a cabana, and so much more.
Syntax: AI Assistant Hacks Gym
An AI assistant goes rogue and hacks a gym website, a $9k surprise Cloudflare bill lands in someone's inbox, and AI subscriptions start promising unlimited usage.
|
|
Ask the machine what it is before you change it
I spent today on a control plane that provisions plain VMs over SSH — the kind of app where a wrong answer doesn't render badly, it reinstalls a database daemon on a machine that's serving traffic.
Your storage format is the one thing you cannot refactor
Ten days ago I published a post about encrypting personal data at rest in Symfony. A reader, Mads Hansen, left a comment that did not argue with the cryptography at all. It argued with seven characters that were not there.
The Bug That Threw No Errors: How a Repeat-Trial Guard Silently Killed Our Free Trial Funnel
I'm the lead developer on Rev6.fit, a fitness membership platform built on WordPress + WooCommerce Subscriptions + LearnDash. It runs 49 plugins, five membership families, and a stack of custom code snippets — the kind of production environment where every change has a blast radius.
Defeating the OFFSET Death Spiral: Cursor Pagination
When you build a data-heavy application—like an e-commerce catalog, a social media feed, or a logging dashboard—pagination is one of the first features you implement. In Laravel, this is incredibly simple. You write User::paginate(15); and Laravel automatically handles the database querying, counts the total number of records, and generates the HTML links for "Page 1, Page 2, Page 3."
AI review can help with Laravel upgrades, but it should not make the decisions
Laravel upgrades are one of the easiest places to overestimate AI. It looks perfect for the job: large diffs, framework changes, repetitive refactors, and lots of surface area to scan. In practice, AI review is useful, but it is not where the important upgrade decisions get made.
When “Premature End of Script Headers” Isn’t PHP: The Laravel Vite Bug That Cost Me Hours
I lost the better part of a morning chasing one of the most frustrating production bugs I’ve hit in a long time.
How I Handle the Super-admin Role in My Laravel Project
Almost every project I work on needs roles and permissions. And almost always, there’s one special role: superadmin. This role is usually assigned to a single user at the start of a project setup, acting as the “master key”, able to access every feature without exception.
|
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
yajra/laravel-datatables-html
Laravel DataTables HTML builder plugin.
cerbero/json-parser
Zero-dependencies pull parser to read large JSON from any source in a memory-efficient way.
riverskies/laravel-mobile-detect
Instant mobile detection access directly from within Blade templates.
landrok/language-detector
A fast and reliable PHP library for detecting languages.
patchlevel/worker
Gives the opportunity to build a stable worker that terminates properly when limits are exceeded.
mattwright/urlresolver
PHP class that attempts to resolve URLs to a final, canonical link.
laminas/laminas-mvc-plugins
Collection of all stable laminas-mvc plugins served via separate packages.
codezero/laravel-unique-translation
Check if a translated value in a JSON column is unique in the database.
mnapoli/simple-s3
Simple, single-file and dependency-free AWS S3 client.
beeyev/disposable-email-filter-php
Disposable (temporary/throwaway/fake) email detection library. Automatically updated every week.
|
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?
|
|
|
|
