The PHP Weekly: Symfony’s Clock, AI Agents, and New Books
From advanced patterns in Symfony and PHP’s role in AI to a brand new book for Laravel developers launching this month.
With late November upon us, the pressure is on to wrap up those big end-of-year features. It’s that time when architectural decisions made months ago really show their true colors, for better or worse.
Just last week, my team was untangling a particularly nasty bug in a core transaction service, all stemming from some ‘magic’ in our old ORM. It was a painful reminder of why clean, explicit design is so critical. Seeing the article on a ‘Clean, Driver-Aware ORM Architecture’ felt incredibly timely and validating. Sometimes you just need to refactor and remove the magic.
But it’s not just about fixing the old; it’s about looking ahead. The piece on PHP’s potential future as an agent framework for AI is genuinely thought-provoking. It paints a picture of where our favorite language could be heading, which is an exciting, if not slightly daunting, prospect. Let’s get into it.
PHP
📚 PHP’s Next Chapter: From Web Framework to Agent Framework
I’ve spent the last year building Neuron, a PHP framework designed specifically for agentic AI applications. What started as a technical challenge became something else entirely when developers began reaching out with stories I wasn’t prepared to hear.
📚 A Clean, Driver-Aware ORM Architecture in PHP
I recently completed a major refactor of my custom ORM, evolving it from a hybrid Active Record structure into a clean, layered, driver-aware architecture. The new design removes hidden “magic”, improves type-safety, and gives each component a precise, single responsibility.
📚 PHP 8.5 Just Leveled Up the Entire Language — The Features You Can’t Ignore
Let’s be honest — PHP has been through a lot. For years, it carried the weight of old memes about being “outdated.” But with every new release, PHP has quietly reinvented itself — and PHP 8.5 is where that transformation hits full stride.
📚 Create your first custom Phpstan rule
When PHPStan analyzes a PHP file, the first step is parsing, converting the raw PHP source code into a structured tree that represents the syntax and semantics of your code.
📚 PHP OOP Mastery Series — A Complete Beginner-to-Advanced Guide
Welcome to the PHP OOP Mastery Series, a complete journey designed to take you from beginner to advanced in Object-Oriented Programming using PHP.
📚 How to Configure PHP max_execution_time to Prevent Timeouts
Have you ever waited forever for a webpage to load, only to be greeted by a frustrating “Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded” error? This common issue is often caused by hitting the max_execution_time limit set in your server’s PHP configuration.
📚 PHP Mailer Tutorial with Examples and Best Practices
In this guide, we’ll walk through everything you need to know about php mailer in plain English, with live code snippets and practical tips. Ready to become an email-sending pro?
📚 The PHP Foundation is Seeking a New Executive Director
We’re opening the search for our next Executive Director, marking an important milestone in the continued growth and evolution of the PHP Foundation.
📚 Visionary Leadership Required
PHP’s governance model differs from most engineering organizations in that it lacks any kind of formal leadership. Instead of decisions being taken on deeply analytical technical merit, and aligned with the goals of the organization, decisions are made by a mixture of technical and non-technical experts following a free-for-all discussion; often discussions are hard to follow, bloated, and don’t always result in a clear consensus.
📚 Async Failure Recovery: Queue vs Streaming Channel Strategies
This article will change how you think about asynchronous systems. You’ll understand why a recovery strategy that works perfectly for queue-based workflows will break your event streaming orchestration.
Laravel
📚 Writing Maintainable Feature test(Real Laravel example)
In this post, I’ll walk through a real-world inspired example from a warehouse module where I had to ensure zones (locations in a warehouse) could only be deactivated or updated under specific conditions.
📚 Laravel Architecture: 7 Traps and Practical Fixes
The author has repeatedly encountered the opinion among colleagues that development experience in Symfony and Laravel is equivalent. Both are good, everyone is happy. In reality, Laravel accelerates development, but the price of speed is the risk of architectural sprawl of logic.
📚 Modernizing Code with Rector - Laravel In Practice EP12
Ever inherit a Laravel project with outdated patterns, or find yourself manually updating code across dozens of files when Laravel releases new features? That’s where Rector PHP comes in.
📚 Authentication With Laravel and MongoDB
Thank you very much for joining me for this tutorial, where you’ll learn how to set up user authentication for Laravel and MongoDB. We start by setting up a local development environment, going over some changes to the files, and finally, having a complete basic authentication running with MongoDB.
📚 Mastering JWT Auth in Laravel from Zero — Part 2
In Part 1 of this series, we prepared a clean Laravel foundation for working with JWT authentication. We explored how JWTs work, installed the firebase/php-jwt library, created a configuration file, and built a reusable JwtService capable of generating and decoding tokens.
📚 Understanding Intersection Types in PHP And Laravel: The Next Step Toward Safer, Smarter Code
In this article, we’ll dive deep into intersection types, explore real-world use cases (especially in Laravel applications), and learn how they help us write safer, cleaner, and more predictable code.
📚 Deploying Laravel on Google Cloud Platform: The Complete Production Guide
In this comprehensive guide, I’ll walk you through deploying a production-ready Laravel application.
📚 Cache Routes and Config During Testing in Laravel 12.38
The Laravel team released version 12.38.0 this week, adding a WithCachedRoutes test trait, a WithCachedConfig test trait, a model prompt for the model:show command, and more.
📚 New Book: Laravel for the Rest of Us launches November 18, 2025
A new book titled Laravel for the Rest of Us by Pete Heslop, Managing Director of Steadfast Collective and an official Laravel Partner, will be released worldwide on November 18, 2025.
📚 CodeRabbit raised $60M and celebrated with a hilarious short film
A few months back, CodeRabbit announced a $60 million Series B, and to celebrate, they made a funny video featuring none other than Aaron Francis.
📚 All Talks for Wire:Live are Available on YouTube
Livewire’s 2025 Wire:Live conference talks are now available in a YouTube playlist.
📚 Saloon vs Guzzle vs SDK vs Http Facade for Laravel API Integrations
The following article is a short snippet from the “Building an API Integration Using Saloon” chapter of my book “Consuming APIs In Laravel”.
This article outlines how I solved that problem by designing a generic, reusable search engine that works for any Laravel model, supports nested relationships, dynamic sorting, pagination, and optional caching — all from a single service.
Symfony
📚 Time as a Dependency: Advanced Patterns with the Symfony Clock
With Symfony 7.3 (released May 2025) and PHP 8.4, the symfony/clock component is no longer just a utility — it is the backbone of deterministic application architecture.
Symfony 7.4.0-RC2 has just been released. This is a pre-release version of Symfony 7.4. If you want to test it in your own applications before its final release, run the following commands.
📚 November 10–16, 2025 - A Week of Symfony #985
This week, Symfony released maintenance versions 5.4.50, 6.4.29, and 7.3.7 to address a potential security vulnerability. Meanwhile, we continued polishing the upcoming Symfony 7.4 and 8.0 releases and published 7.4.0 RC1 and 8.0.0 RC1. Finally, we shared new details about several of the talks planned for SymfonyCon Amsterdam 2025.
📚 The Shortcut Syndrome: Symfony, AI, and the Decline of Real Craft
Man, everyone’s doing Symfony these days. But I still remember back in 2013 — it felt like an elite circle. You really had to earn your stripes: deep PHP, solid OOP, algorithms, design patterns, system architecture, testing, and understanding all the constraints of building real applications.