Last Month in PHP: 2015 December

Created: Wed, 06 Jan 2016 22:02:00 GMT

Time to read: 3 minutes

From a KCPUG lightning talk given on 06 Jan 2016

December was a busy month in PHP. A major update to PHP was released, PHP-FIG approved a new PSR, major CMSes had major releases and/or were patched, and frameworks had major, minor, and patch releases.

PHP 7.0.1

PHP 7.0 was released on 3 December and was patched to 7.0.1 two weeks later. PHP 7 includes many new improvements, including:

  • speed!
  • Scalar type hinting
  • Return type declarations (optional)
  • New operators:
    • Null coalescing: ??
    • Spaceship: <=>
  • Constant arrays
  • Anonymous classes

See PHP 7 New Features for more information.

PSR-6 Caching Interface

PSR-6 ensures a common interface for caching support in PHP, for those libraries and frameworks that utilize it.

  • Allows free-standing libraries to support caching of intermediary data without effort.
  • Provides a common interface for basic and intermediate-level caching needs.

On 8 December, this passed amidst controversy.

See PSR-6 for more information.

WordPress 4.4: “Clifford”

On 8 December, the new version of WordPress, <abbr title “also known as”>aka “Clifford”, was released.

Some of its new features:

WordPress 4.4 requires PHP 5.2.4+, although PHP 5.6+ is recommended.

See: WordPress 4.4 announcement for more information.

Drupal 8.0.1

Drupal 8 was released on 19 November and the first patch was released on 2 December.

New features of Drupal 8 include:

  • HTML 5
  • Out-of-the-box WYSIWYG editing
  • Built with modern PHP practices & Libraries:
    • Composer, Symfony2, Guzzle, Twig, etc.
  • REST web services

Drupal 8 requires PHP 5.5.9+.

See Drupal 8 for more information.

Slim 3.0 Microframework

Slim 3.0 was released on 7 December.

New features of Slim 3.0 include:

Slim 3.0 requires PHP 5.5+

Symfony framework

Symfony 3.0 was released on 30 November and was patched to 3.0.1 on 26 December.

New features of Symfony 3 include:

  • Locale has been supplanted by Intl
  • Simplified security
  • Simplified voters
  • Monolog Bridge is now PSR-3 compatible
  • Changes in the ways Property Access, Routing, Logging, Translator, Twig, Validator, Yaml, Process, & Swiftmailer, Config, & more are used

Symfony 3 requires PHP 5.5.9+

Patches:

  • Symfony 3.0.1
  • Symfony 2.8.1
  • Symfony 2.7.8
  • Symfony 2.3.36

Laravel 5.2 framework

Laravel 5.2 was released on 21 December.

New features of Laravel 5.2 include:

  • Auth Scaffolding
  • Implicit model bindingAppending output from scheduled tasks
  • Form array validation
  • Collections wildcards
  • Database Session Driver
  • Middleware Groups
  • Rate Limiting
  • Eloquent Global Scope

Virtual Machine: Laravel Homestead 5.2

Now with:

  • PHP7
  • Composer
  • git

Requires PHP 5.5.9+

See: Homestead 5.2

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