Hi everyone,
Week after week we send out news and updates on anything and everything PHP. This week we have new releases from Php and Symfony. PHP 8.6.0 RC2 is now available for testing, and The PHP foundation is kicking Off the Community Events Coalition Special Interest Group. In Tutorials we have guides for Email testing in PHP, which was submitted by one of our readers. We also have tutorials on Preventing Race Conditions in Symfony with Doctrine and PostgreSQL, and Memoize Tagged Cache Reads in Laravel. Finally in our Reading section, we have articles on “missing” memory in a PHP array, Why This PHP Security Patch Deserves Your Attention Now, and You Can’t Delete an Event. So How Do You Honor GDPR Erasure?
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
What Really Happens When a PHP Object Is Created?
From class User to new User() — understanding PHP objects without the usual OOP jargon.
Laravel Context: The Hidden Information That Follows Your Code
Laravel Context provides a place to store information that belongs to the current execution of your application.
SOLID Principles in PHP and Laravel: First Part (SRP or Single Responsibility Principle)
SRP says a class should have one reason to change. That does not mean one method or one line. It means one job. If a database change, a new JSON format, and a new validation rule all force you to edit the same class, that class has too many responsibilities.
PHP, markdown and no dependencies
The more I thought about the technical side of the project, the less interested I became in using a traditional CMS. Romantic-weekend.com is not meant to be a complicated application.
10 PHP Concepts Every WordPress Developer Should Understand in 2026
Modern WordPress development isn’t just about knowing functions.php. These 10 PHP concepts can help you write safer, cleaner, and more maintainable WordPress plugins and themes.
Why PHP is Quietly Becoming the Best Backend Language Again
PHP is making one of the strongest backend comebacks in modern development quietly, efficiently and without hype.
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Tutorials and Talks
Decide with Jev: Laravel AI That Answers with a Probability
Before I send a tutorial to an editor, I check one thing. Does the draft do what the brief asked for? A brief is the plan for an article. It says what the reader should learn. The draft is what the writer turned in. Sometimes the two don't match.
Memoize Tagged Cache Reads in Laravel
Laravel's memoized cache, Cache::memo(), reads a key from your cache store once and serves it from memory for the rest of the request or job. Starting in Laravel 13.33, it also works with cache tags, so you can memoize tagged values with Cache::memo()->tags().
Email testing in PHP
When it comes to email communication, it's a critical feature for many web applications. From user sign-ups and password resets to notifications and marketing campaigns, emails play a big role in many web apps.
"Duplicate entry '0' for key PRIMARY" usually means your database lost AUTO_INCREMENT
Installing a plugin fails with: Duplicate entry '0' for key 'PRIMARY'. The obvious reading is that the plugin tried to insert a row with id 0. The actual reading is usually the opposite: the plugin inserted a row without naming the id column, relied on AUTO_INCREMENT to supply one, and got 0 because the column no longer has AUTO_INCREMENT on it.
Integrating a Web Application Firewall with PHP: A Guide Using Slim 3 Framework and Shieldon
In this article, we'll walk you through how to integrate a Web Application Firewall (WAF) with a PHP-based web application using the Slim 3 framework. By the end, you will understand how to set up a self-hosted WAF to improve your application's resilience to attacks and manage common security threats.
Preventing Race Conditions in Symfony with Doctrine and PostgreSQL
This article uses seat reservations as an example, but the same approach applies to inventory, balances and guarded status transitions.
02 - Persistent Memory Chat in PHP - History That Survives Restarts
Sessions are the easy answer for chat history, but they vanish when the browser closes or the server restarts. For anything that should remember - a support bot, a notes assistant, a shared conversation - you want history to outlive the process. |
News and Announcements
Continuing to Move PHP Open Source Forward
A year ago, we introduced the first wave of PhpStorm’s open-source sponsorships. We truly believe in the power of open source and the importance of it to the PHP community, and so we want to do our bit, too.
Tagged Memoized Cache and Model Refreshes in Laravel 13.33
The Laravel team released v13.33.0 with tag support for the memoized cache, a Refreshes model attribute that reloads generated columns after a write, and more,
PHP 8.6.0 RC2 available for testing
The PHP team is pleased to announce the first release candidate of PHP 8.6.0, RC2. It is not a typo: a mistake was made while packaging RC1, so RC2 was released instead. For a full explanation, please see this blog post. This continues the PHP 8.6 release cycle, whose rough outline is specified in the PHP Wiki.
PHP 8.3.35, PHP 8.5.11, PHP 8.2.34 & PHP 8.4.26 Released
The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 8.3.35, PHP 8.5.11, PHP 8.2.34 & PHP 8.4.26. This is a security release.
Symfony 8.1.8, Symfony 7.4.20 & Symfony 6.4.47 Released
Symfony 8.1.8, Symfony 7.4.20 & Symfony 6.4.47 has just been 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.
Kicking Off the Community Events Coalition Special Interest Group
Community events are the lifeblood of the PHP ecosystem. They're where people come to learn from each other, meet new people, expand their professional networks, build things together, strengthen friendships, sharpen their public speaking skills, and experience the power of belonging to a community. Most importantly, community events are where we build trust with each other.
This Week In PHP Internals | Sept 24, 2026
PHP is getting a new class for a moment in time: precise to the nanosecond, no timezone, leap seconds ignored on purpose — and it can't tell you what time it is. That's the Time\Instant and Time\Clock RFC from Tim Düsterhus and Derick Rethans: to get the time, you ask a clock. Plus the regex RFC's callback question finally settled, Gina P. Banyard's compiled-regex alternative, a closure-as-entry-point idea that lasted a day, why switching PASSWORD_DEFAULT to Argon2 ran into OpenSSL, and str_mask meeting the same question as array_str_contains.
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Podcasts and Vlogs
Laravel News: Laravel MCP, Bifrost's Birthday, and Laravel 14
Jake and Michael discuss all the latest Laravel releases, tutorials, and happenings in the community.
The Stack Overflow: Your phone is AI’s newest hardware
Ryan sits down with Div Garg, CEO at AGI Inc., to talk about running AI agents entirely on mobile devices, optimizing models for edge computing chips, and building safety mechanisms into autonomous app interactions.
Maintainable Podcast: José Valim: Designing a Language You Can Maintain for Decades
What does maintainability look like when the software you’re responsible for is a programming language? José Valim creator of Elixir and founder of Dashbit, joins Robby to talk about software that can “fit in your head,” the importance of clear boundaries, and why maintaining a language requires a different level of restraint than maintaining an application.
Software Engineering Radio: SE Radio 739: Erin Catto on Video Game Physics Engines
Erin Catto of Kintsugiyama, veteran video game developer who worked on the Tomb Raider series at Crystal Dynamics and later contributed to Diablo III, Overwatch, and other franchises at Blizzard, discusses video game physics engines with host Jason Davey.
Shoptalk Show: Web Performance with Ben Schwarz
Ben Schwarz stops by to discuss the state of web performance, using his research on airline websites as a case study for practical insights on improving website speed and user experience.
Laravel Podcast: How a Non-Developer Builds and Ships Laravel Apps with AI Agents
In the Season 7 finale, Matt Stauffer talks with Sam Sappenfield, senior field marketing manager and two-time Laravel team member, about her unlikely path from athlete to journalism grad to marketer to Laravel's first dedicated events hire.
PHP Architect: The PHP Podcast 2026.09.24
Ian Littman joins the crew to talk PHP community and conferences. Longhorn PHP is three weeks out with a brand new format, the industry keeps shifting under everyone’s feet, and RAM prices remain a personal insult. The hallway track survives it all.
Mostly Technical: 151: Tokenmogged
Ian and Aaron discuss Opus 5.5, Aaron's HomeOS, Ian's token usage, what's new with Aaron's office, and so much more.
Syntax: Is the Jev Hype Overblown?
Is Jev actually a leap forward for classification or just hype and fake demos? We dig in, plus Claude Code's new AGENTS.md support, TinyCast (the free, open-source Raycast alternative), an iPhone Fold simulator in Xcode, and a stack of dev tools you'll want to try.
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You Can’t Delete an Event. So How Do You Honor GDPR Erasure?
How I do a GDPR right-to-erasure request in an append-only, event-sourced Symfony app — with forgettable payloads, and where the pattern stops working.
Laravel 13 the most important Feature to care About
Here are the biggest additions in Laravel 13 that make writing modern laravel php code feel better than ever.
“missing” memory in a PHP array
I was profiling a data pipeline and noticed something that didn’t make sense: two arrays, same 1 million integer keys (0 to 999,999), same integer values — but one was using 17MB and the other was using 42MB.
TypePHP! Is it TypeScript?
Is it TypeScript for PHP? The Reality Behind Swoole’s New Framework. We all know about the PHP language, which is mostly used for website development. It is used in wordpress, drupal, etc. One of the most widely used and old server-side scripting language.
Why This PHP Security Patch Deserves Your Attention Now
On August 27, 2026, the PHP development team shipped 8.5.10 and 8.4.25, a PHP security patch that closes two tracked CVEs alongside a cluster of memory safety bugs in bundled libraries.
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Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
binarybuilds/laritor-client
The official Laritor client for Laravel. Stream traces, exceptions, queries, jobs, and more to your Laritor dashboard in under 30 seconds.
particle/filter
Flexible and highly usable filter library with no dependencies.
catfan/medoo
The lightweight PHP database framework to accelerate development.
icehouse-ventures/laravel-chartjs
Simple package to facilitate and automate the use of charts in Laravel using the Chart.js library.
patchlevel/hydrator
A library for seamless hydration of objects to arrays - and back again, optimized for developer experience and performance.
dave-liddament/php-language-extensions
Attributes for extending the PHP language, using static analysis to enforce new language constructs.
kartik-v/yii2-detail-view
Enhanced Yii 2 Detail View widget with special Bootstrap styles, ability to edit data, and more.
emargareten/inertia-modal
Inertia Modal is a Laravel package that lets you implement backend-driven modal dialogs for Inertia apps.
patchlevel/worker
Gives the opportunity to build a stable worker that terminates properly when limits are exceeded.
pear/spreadsheet_excel_writer
Allows writing of Excel spreadsheets without the need for COM objects. Supports formulas, images (BMP) and all kinds of formatting for text and cells.
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