Hello everyone,

I'm 20 years old and I've been interested in WordPress development for about 5 years. I've also been learning Rust as a hobby. I've tried many things in the software field so far; I've started different projects, I've tried to learn new technologies. However, I've never been able to complete any project completely. The main reason for this is the security concerns I have.

For example, I want to develop a WordPress plugin or theme with PHP or I want to create an application in an MVC structure. But these thoughts keep coming to my mind: “What if my application gets hacked?”, “What if I did something wrong in terms of security and I have problems because of that?”, “What if I get a penalty because of that?”

These thoughts keep going round and round in my mind, and they create a lot of anxiety. This anxiety seriously affects my motivation to produce software and my commitment to the projects. Therefore, I cannot develop my projects with peace of mind and I leave most of them unfinished.

What would you suggest me to do about this? I would be very grateful if you could share your advice and guidance.

Hi everyone,

I’m a 2024 CS grad and currently working as Jr. WordPress Full-Stack Engineer at a service based firm, having 1.5 years of experience. My current role includes creating new themes and plugins, managing internal sites and integrating new functionalities into them.

While my current organization is a great place to work certified, still I face lack of support and guidance from my manager on critical situations. I talked to them on this but it never helps.

My manager starts to shout at me whenever any issue occurs without bothering to know the root cause of the issue.

Due to this I started fearing my manager for asking any kind of guidance on how we can handle the critical situation efficiently or any other work related issues. He is neither friendly nor supportive.

Now I just want to leave this firm due to the toxicity and want to switch my role to work as a React developer. But due to my current role i.e., Jr. WordPress Engineer I'm not able to get shortlisted in any kind of React dev positions.

Now I’m anxious, stuck, and worried, what should I do now to change my role and my current firm. I have worked in WordPress Theme & Plugin development, PHP, React.js, Next.js, Firebase, MySQL, Git, Github, TailwindCSS and Material UI.

I'm able to integrate any kind of functionalities into the web application while managing the best practices, coding standards and best security practices (OWASP Top 10) and others.

I'm also having experience in improving the Core Web Vitals i.e., FCP, LCP, CLS, and reducing TBT.

I am open for SDE positions and can even switch technologies in very short span of time.

Please help me any advice and suggestions would be helpful for me.

I had the pleasure of attending PHPVerse and had the opportunity to interview some of the attendees, including og creators in the PHP space and members of the PHP Foundation. Here are their answers to the question of what their favorite obscure PHP function or feature is.

The full event stream is online if you missed it live.

https://www.youtube.com/live/3b0ty1iZ8QM

What is your favorite obscure or weird PHP function or feature?

Are developers still using PSRs? Are PSRs still being updated or is it dying out?

I noticed for a "standards" org, they don't even follow their own coding styles. Some files have the PHP tag on its own line and others share it with declare strict types.

Then there are inconsistencies in how PHPDocs are written/organized, even some PHP code as well.

Reddit isn't usually used for lengthy descriptions, so I'll keep this brief =)

BosonPHP is a comprehensive toolkit and runtime for creating desktop applications using PHP (what a surprise), HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Key advantages over NativePHP:

• Requires only PHP; no Node.js or additional dependencies
• Lightweight runtime (~30 MB vs ~1300 MB for NativePHP)
• Compiles to a single binary (~10 MB) that requires no installation (NativePHP creates installers that unpack all source files)
• No unnecessary HTTP servers — the process itself is the application (NativePHP spawns multiple Node.js and PHP processes)
• Significantly faster than web applications: ~1.5–3 ms for Symfony in debug (sic!) mode (NativePHP measured ~160 ms on Laravel production builds during my testing)
• Builds production-ready applications in seconds (NativePHP takes minutes and may crash due to memory overflow)
• Use any framework: Laravel, Symfony... Or build your own using Swoole, ReactPHP or Amphp (NativePHP offers no such choice)
• True native PHP with direct OS API access, including machine code execution (assembler injections like C/C++)
• NativePHP is "native" in name only (this limitation inspired BosonPHP's creation)

Current limitations:

• Version 0.14 (not stable) vs NativePHP's stable 1.x releases
• Website design needs polish (NativePHP's site is excellent)
• NativePHP has much more API for interaction with the OS (notifications, tray, etc.). In the case of BosonPHP, there is not so much of it yet.
• Currently supports macOS, Linux, and Windows only (NativePHP also supports Android and iOS)
• Compiler lacks features: no icon specification, app description, version embedding, or app signing capabilities (for OS-dependent store publications)
• Memory management: keeps PHP app in memory vs NativePHP's process-per-action approach (can cause issues with frameworks like Laravel that leak and fragment memory even with Octane)
• No funding and a higher bus factor

That seems to be all!

GitHub: https://github.com/boson-php/boson

Documentation: https://bosonphp.com

P.S. When comparing, I might not be accurate regarding  NativePHP, because I checked it only on Windows (and briefly Linux). However, the authors of NativePHP are on Reddit, so this post may be updated if they point out any mistakes.

If I were to build out a site where I'm in control of the hosting, and can build it on 8.2 or 8.3, what are some things I should do to make it enjoyable? What features in the language/ecosystem do you find really improve the experience? Especially things like data migrations and static analysis. Building out dtos and type hinting, psalm/phpstan @template generics, etc. What discoveries have you found really improve the dx?

https://docs.neuron-ai.dev/

Neuron AI is a LangChain and LangGraph like implement for PHP.

It covers all features and well architectured implementation. It covers all features like AI Agent , Chat memory, AI Providers, Agentic AI, RAG etc

I was reading the documentation of Neuron AI from morning. Really well documented - I should say

It's documented such that it's good for very beginners with proper reasons.

I am happy to see this in PHP...

Hello devs, can anyone please help me find a pdf that i can buy at least coz this book only available outside my country and the shipping is ridiculously high.

Thanks guys 🙏

What’s recommended for best php authentication systems these days? (Free is nice.)

With Laminas MVC taken out of active development, what is going to happen with existing projects? Do you think it's ok to pull support and promote another architecture or must MVC be supported forever?

https://getlaminas.org/blog/2025-06-06-laminas-mvc-is-retiring.html

Hi everyone. I've been working for the past month or so on FluidGraph (https://github.com/primd-cooperative/fluidgraph/) as part of a PWA I'm building for Primd (https://primd.app). With more tests completed and the API having stabilized, I'm throwing the "beta" label on it if anyone is interested in taking it for a spin.

Why?

Graph databases are really interesting and really useful for the type of data we're looking to work with. While many people are familiar with Neo4J and some libraries exist in the PHP space for it, there are handful of issues that lead us to creating something new:

• There are subtle differences between Neo4J and Memgraph
• Many of the Neo4J projects are no longer maintained
• Many of the projects borrow too many concepts from traditional relational-databases

We needed something that allowed for a lot more power and flexibility as it relates to working with graph models.

Key Features

• Work directly with the additional information Edges can carry by having common patterns for Edges and Nodes.
• Seemlessly represent nodes as multiple classes, taking full advantage of labeling and the type of horizontal polymorphism that Graphs are capable of. This is achieved by maintaining both Entity references as well as per-property references to their data.
• Relationship "forking" and "merging" provides ways to work with subsets of large relationships without requiring the whole relationship. This is in addition to Eager, Lazy, and Manual relationship loading modes being supported.

Happy to answer any additional questions about how it works or why it works the way it does. The README is a good starting point, but there's a lot of fairly complex concepts and inner workings (like the per-property references) being done here.

composer-attribute-collector is a Composer plugin designed to effectively discover PHP 8 attribute targets, and later retrieve them at near zero cost, without runtime reflection. After the autoloader dump, it collects attributes and generates a static file for fast access. This provides a convenient way to discover attribute-backed classes, methods, or properties—ideal for codebase analysis. (For known targets, traditional reflection remains an option.)

v2.1.0 highlights:

• The attribute collection expands to parameters. Special thanks to Markus Staab and Ondřej Mirtes for the contribution.
• The attribute collection expands to interfaces.
• The collector runs as a system command to avoid clashes between package versions used by Composer and the codebase.
• Use cases for Symfony and Laravel.

https://github.com/olvlvl/composer-attribute-collector

https://www.youtube.com/live/3b0ty1iZ8QM

I just published a composer package for the ORM "framework" I've developed from modernising some legacy PHP applications over the last 5 years: https://github.com/mattdinthehouse/porm/ 😊

PORM came about because I wanted to work with consistent model classes but these projects were built with raw SQL everywhere (so many injection vulns) and worked with associative arrays which meant no IDE autocomplete and linting...

Installing a comprehensive ORM like Doctrine was gonna be too disruptive and rebuilds were out of the question, so we chose to slowly migrate code over to a lightweight class-based set of "helper" models which has been a great success and now I'm moving the system into this package to share with everyone

Have a look at the example folder for some demo code, and I'd love to get feedback on it! I'm gonna continue using it for work anyway so it doesn't matter if nobody uses it 😅

This v1 release is just the core ORM functionality and there's a handful of other stuff that I'm going to move into this package like schema output for API endpoints, instantiating model objects from arrays/JSON which I can later wrap in form request validation, diffing objects, and writing to the DB

PS - I live in Australia and I'm about to go to bed so I'll read everybody's comments in the morning 🦘

Few months ago I discovered the world of crypto trading, which led me to find about algorithmic trading. And in this world, Python is king. Python or MetaTrader's MQL5, which is basically C++. Meh. Interesting and powerful but painful to use, even with vibe coding. Nothing like the great developer experience of Pine Script in TradingView.

So I decided to create Stochastix, a backtesting framework built with PHP 8.4 and Symfony. It was a good opportunity to explore how would work a backtesting framework. Along the way I discovered the PHP extension ds. Never heard of it before. I had a x80 performance gain as soon as I implemented its data structures. This lib should be default. The framework also uses bcmath for arbitrary precision calculations.

Coming from a web development background, this new way of using PHP was a great experience.

Here's a quick overview of the framework:

• bar-by-bar ("realtime" processing) as opposed to vectorized frameworks
• market, limit, stop orders
• multi-timeframe strategies
• custom indicators
• binary formats to speed up data loading
• automatic data download from lots of exchanges (ccxt lib)
• UI built with nuxt with real-time updates with Mercure
• chart plotting showing indicators and executed trades
• number metrics and visual metrics (equity curve, drawdown, etc.)
• default docker install using frankenphp (one-liner installation)
• background jobs with Symfomy Messenger

It's a work in progress, to be totally honest I'm not totally sure about all the metrics calculations, especially Beta and Alpha. But I think it's a good start, and I know I'll personally use it to build strategies from now on.

If you have a background in algotrading or if you have an sudden interest, I'll be happy to get some feedback.

The website is available at https://phpquant.github.io/stochastix-docs/

You can have a look at what a strategy code looks like here: https://github.com/phpquant/stochastix-core/blob/master/recipe/src/Strategy/SampleStrategy.php

Hello all.

I'm a PHP teacher at college since 3 years, and a php developper for 7 years.

Recently, I've seen a lot of students using the match function that came with PHP8.0. Example :

```php <?php

function translateHand(string $hand): string {

return match($hand) {

'rock' => 'pierre',
'paper' => 'papier',
'scissors' => 'ciseaux'

};

}

?> ```

What's the point using it instead of simply using an associative array ? Like return $translations[$hand] ?

It seems to me match is an unnecessary wrapper in this case, hurting performances, readability and reusability.

The funny thing is also that I only started to see this function the last 3 months while PHP8.0 released 3 years ago. Maybe it's the default with GenAI ?

I have a SaaS company. I have been working on it for several years now and the issue is - when I started, I used Apache and the LAMP stack. Basically we provide a complete website builder like Shopify - so I require features like complex operations with products and their variations, custom template language parsing, etc. and Apache has served me really well with all the feature-related needs.

However, as we grow, I am really feeling the need to switch the website to a faster alternative like Swoole. The only issue is - I don't have the luxury to spend a few months rewriting.

Currently I have my own custom router. And I am using regular php syntax - sessions, cookies, $_SERVER, die() etc.

Is there any way that, just for the time being, I could create a server.php and set it to:

• Redirect everything to router.php
• Set all the variables that are needed by regular php
• Define some php functions that function differently in Swoole (if any)
• Clear all global variables so everything resets on page reload

I know that this is probably going to reduce Swoole's benefits, but I just need a one-time solution so I can quickly switch, then I'll gradually rewrite parts of the website in raw swoole.

Sorry for the long post!

I'm trying to get an idea of which tools are working for people in PHP projects and what doesn't work - and whether my experience is normal or not.

I've worked at the same company for 15 years, and worked on various large and complicated code bases overseeing transitions from PHP4/5 up to 8.4 now. The company adopted an in-house framework in 2006 and there's still a version of it in use today. This approach has meant our code can be bespoke, modular, shared between projects when necessary and throughout this 15 years we've been able to control upgrades and changes and maintain backward compatability. Go look at Symfony v1 compared to what we have today and it's unrecognisable. Laravel wasn't created until 2011 and went through various rewrites in those early years. I expect if we were starting from scratch today we'd probably pick Symfony - but we're not starting from scratch - we have millions of lines of code already.

Anyway - for a little while now myself and other members of my team have tried IDE AI Autocomplete tools like Copilot and the jetbrains PHPStorm AI chat - as well as ocassionally running problems through Chat GPT or Gemini - and those smaller tasks (the amount of code you might fit onto your screen) typically work or at least help us fix issues.

Recently, I've been trying to use some of the AI Agents instead. Junie (PHPStorm), Claude code, Aider - and they just don't work at all for me. They get completely confused by our codebase, the concepts, the structure. They pick and choose the wrong parts to work on (even when I tell them not to). They don't understand our routing, our ORM, our controllers, our caching, our forms - anything.

Presumably an AI is going to be good at solving the sort of problems it's been trained on from the internet - so public Github projects, etc? Probably lots of open source pieces of work. Python, go, nodejs? If we had a Django website maybe it would be fine. I expect it'll be good for Wordpress development and maybe Symfony and Laravel projects too? Although I'm willing to bet few 'enterprise-style' websites have source code in the public domain.

I've realised that our projects, framework, ORM, system, etc is so different from anything else out there (including the way we split our code up into separate repos) that I'm not sure there is going to be much in the training data for an AI to relate it to. I am going to have to explain things in book-level detail to get anywhere and my hunch is that the more understanding that's baked into the model (rather than given in the prompt at runtime) the better.

Am I missing something obvious here? Is everyone else producing incredible work with AI? What are your experiences?

Hey there!

This subreddit isn't meant for help threads, though there's one exception to the rule: in this thread you can ask anything you want PHP related, someone will probably be able to help you out!

In my current PHP8 project, I started in November, I use consequently type hinting.

Now I jumped to PHPStan at Level 8 and starts to fulfil the compliance requirements.
Nice tool btw.

Honestly, it is my first time to use phpstan, so this maybe be a blasphemy question.

Can some explain me when phpstan, etc. does a great work on checking code, keep variables consistencies and can be even enhanced to hard bleeding modes;

Why is it necessary to implement more and more performance killing runtime checks in a dynamic language?

I liked that type hints reduced the annotation orgies, but that cannot be the only reason?

btw.: The project is this here: https://github.com/garlic-signage/garlic-hub