Your Weekly PHP Roundup
From multithreading futures and modern microservices to bulletproof code quality pipelines in Laravel.
My first week back at work involved tackling a code review for a feature rushed out before the holidays. It was functional, sure, but seeing all that tight coupling made me think about how we can build better this year.
This week’s collection of articles is perfect for that ‘new year, new code’ mindset. We have a fantastic piece on Modern PHP Development Best Practices that serves as a great refresher for any team. And if you’ve ever found yourself in ‘dependency hell,’ the guide on using the Laravel Service Container is an absolute must-read for turning tangled code into a clean, maintainable system.
So, whether you’re looking back at the highlights from 2025 or looking forward to features like Partial Function Application, there’s plenty here to get your year started on the right foot. Enjoy the read!
PHP
📚 Partial Function Application is coming in PHP 8.6
Ever reach for a simple callback and end up writing a tiny novella—an arrow function stuffed with types, reordered parameters, and boilerplate just to pass one value through?
📚 A Small PHP Tip That Saves Time (and Lines of Code)
This post is a quick, practical PHP tip about classes and constructors that can make your code cleaner, shorter, and easier to read.
📚 Why Your WordPress Site is Slow (Even on “Fast” Hosting)
You did everything right. You bought the premium “Turbo” hosting plan, you installed a caching plugin, and you even compressed your images until they were blurry. Yet, your WordPress site still crawls.
📚 Modern PHP Development: Best Practices for Today
PHP has evolved dramatically in recent years. PHP 8.x brings powerful features that enable cleaner, more performant code. This guide covers modern PHP practices that every developer should know.
📚 Multithreading in PHP: Looking to the Future
Within RFC TrueAsync 1.7 the question arises: how will the proposed RFC interact with possible future changes in PHP core? Having at least a sense of where PHP might go is key to designing the language well for many years. That is why this article exists.
📚 How to Add Settings Pages to WordPress Plugins: A Developer’s Guide
This is the second post in our “Mastering WordPress Plugins” series. In this part we will make the words per minute dynamic by adding a setting with the WordPress Setting API , and retrieving it with the WordPress Options API.
📚 Building a Modern PHP Microservices Architecture with Docker
Learn how to build a scalable, production-ready microservices system with PHP, Docker, and modern DevOps practices.
📚 Strict Comparison in PHP Explained at the Zend Engine Level
While browsing bugs.php.net, I found an interesting ticket. Someone reported a surprising behavior, and I wanted to understand what is happening under the hood—because I think this is a really important concept to understand in PHP internals.
📚 Bridging Rust and PHP with whyNot: A Learner’s Journey
When you’re learning a new language, the temptation is to start small: toy projects, simple exercises, maybe a “Hello World” or two. But I’ve always believed the best way to learn is to build something real, something that scratches an itch and forces you to wrestle with the language in practice.
📚 Xdebug Update: November 2025
In this update I explain what happened with Xdebug development in the last month. In the last month, I spent around 28 hours on Xdebug, with 24 hours funded.
📚 Eval Testing LLMs in PHPUnit
I shipped a one-line prompt change and broke a feature I didn’t know I needed to check. Cold Call Coach is a sales training app where AI plays prospect personas - the sceptical buyer, the satisfied customer, the gatekeeper.
📚 Beyond the Blog: A Comprehensive Guide to Modern WordPress for Developers
This article explores why WordPress remains a dominant force and how developers can leverage its power in a modern stack.
Laravel
📚 Laravel Service Container: From Dependency Hell to Clean Code
How I transformed my tightly-coupled Laravel app into a testable, maintainable codebase using the Service Container pattern.
Playing with laravel eloquent while singing a holiday song. Let’s start by cloning the repo I’ve got setup for us.
📚 The Invisible Wall: Building a Bulletproof Code Quality Pipeline in Laravel
Here is how to set up a modern quality pipeline that catches bugs before they exist.
📚 Laravel Prompts: Interactive CLI Made Simple
The beauty of Laravel Prompts lies in its simplicity. Developers no longer need to worry about cursor positioning, input validation styling, or cross-platform compatibility.
📚 Laravel 12.44 Adds HTTP Client afterResponse() Callbacks
The Laravel team released version 12.44, featuring HTTP client callbacks after the response is returned, a TestResponse header assertion method, additional fluent date validation methods, and more.
We’ve hand-picked some of the biggest stories at Laravel News and the Laravel community in 2025. This year, we saw huge product and open-source releases from Laravel, including Laravel 12, Laravel Cloud, and more!
📚 whereHas() vs whereRelation(): Readability Over Shortcuts
Laravel devs love their shortcuts. Tighter syntax, less boilerplate it’s satisfying to trim down a few lines. But let’s be honest: just because code is shorter doesn’t mean it’s better.
📚 Building a University Resource Sharing Platform: My Laravel Learning Journey
As part of my software development journey, I’m building the Strathmore Resource Exchange (SRE) - an internal marketplace for university students to share academic resources. Here’s what I’ve learned so far about Laravel development, routing, and file handling.
Symfony
📚 How to Handle Validation Errors in Symfony the Right Way
Handling validation errors is something every Symfony API needs — yet it often ends up messy, repetitive, and inconsistent.
📚 Symfony 7.4: The Ultimate Guide to Modern Invokable Commands
With the advent of Symfony 5 and 6, we saw the introduction of Invokable Commands — a paradigm shift that allowed us to treat commands more like controllers.
📚 Mastering Multi-Step Forms in Symfony 7.4
It is finally here. After years of relying on third-party bundles, battling with session storage and writing convoluted controller logic to handle “wizards,” Symfony 7.4 has delivered one of the most requested features in the framework’s history: Native Multi-Step Forms.
This post highlights the key accomplishments of the Symfony project in 2025. We are grateful for your continuous support, which helped make 2025 a remarkable year for Symfony.
📚 December 29, 2025 – January 4, 2026 - A Week of Symfony #992
This week, Symfony 6.4.31, 7.3.9, 7.4.3, and 8.0.3 maintenance versions were released. In addition, we published the 2025 year recap blog post to review the main Symfony activity during the last year.
Symfony UX 2.32.0 introduces the new Toolkit Package, a set of fully customizable UI components, with Shadcn UI as the first available kit. The initial components include Button, Dialog, Field, Card, Pagination, Table, and InputGroup.
📚 Unveiling Symfony 7.4: A New Era for Media Validation and DX
In this article, we will explore the new features of Symfony 7.4, with a special focus on the Video constraint, improved console commands and architectural shifts in the HttpFoundation component.