On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new post from editor Bruno Skvorc sharing information about a "gender" extension for PHP that tries to guess the gender of a first name.

Recently, I ventured into a section of the PHP manual which lists extensions that are used to help with Human Language and Character Encoding. I had never looked at them as a whole – while dealing with gettext, for example, I always kind of landed directly on it and ignored the rest. Well, of those others, there’s one that caught my eye – especially in this day and age given the various controversies – the Gender extension.

This extension, in short, tries to guess the gender of first names. As its introduction says: "Gender PHP extension is a port of the gender.c program originally written by Joerg Michael. The main purpose is to find out the gender of firstnames. The current database contains >40000 firstnames from 54 countries."

This is interesting beyond the fact that the author is kinda called George Michael. In fact, there are many aspects of this extension that are quite baffling.

He then walks through some examples of putting the extension to use, evaluating various names in different languages and gauging the results. The extension allows for definite answers (is male/female), relative results, unisex, a "couple" or, when all else fails, erroring or giving a "not found" result. It also can check for "nicknames" for common names. He walks you through getting it installed and shows other functionality for getting similar names and checking for nicknames, showing code examples and the resulting output.

On the Symfony Finland site they've posted a retrospective about moving an application from Symfony 3 to Flex including the work that was done in the switch and the performance of the result.

Earlier this year I did some experimenting with a Hybrid state object between Symfony Twig templates and front end JavaScript frameworks. Since that time I did that experiment, the Symfony Flex project has progressed. I thought I would try how to port the state prototype to Symfony Flex.

[...] In my case the application was rather simple and all built in the AppBundle, which is best-practise in Symfony3 for many applications. I mostly had to move files and configurations around and change namespaces.

He starts by spending some time talking about the difference between a Symfony 3 environment and the environment Flex provides. He then goes through the eight or so steps to move from one to the other including file/directory changes and configuration updates. Next comes the look at performance differences between the two. Unsurprisingly Flex came out on top in every measurement he threw at it.

In addition to the new structure, the apparent improvement in performance is obviously welcome. This would likely be even more evident where I could leave more dependencies out, for example in API workloads. This obviously won't magically push Symfony/PHP into Golang or Node.js territory for raw API throughput, but for existing large code bases it could provide a low-effort boost.

Cal Evans has continued his series covering Mautic, the PHP based self-hosted marketing automation platform. This is step one in the process with his previous post in the series introducing Mautic and why he's trying it out.

This is the second post in a series titled “My Journey into Mautic”. If you are starting here, you might get an incomplete picture, you may want to check out the previous articles.

There are two things that really confuse me about Mautic, properly configuring an Email Service Provider (ESP), and segmenting & tagging. We’ll tackle the latter one in a later post, but the former is an important topic. It is also one that I do not fully understand. What is presented here is what I have learned through trial and error. it my be partially or wholly incorrect. If you find something that I’ve gotten wrong, please, by all means, correct me in the comments.

He starts by defining what an ESP service is and what it's useful for. While he had done the self-hosted email server in the past, he recommends paying for a service these days, deciding for his needs on Mailgun. He covers the difference between transactional and broadcast emails followed by the setup process he followed to get Mailgun up and working with his Mautic install.

Latest PEAR Releases:

• OLE 1.0.0RC3
  

• Pager 2.5.1
  
• Pager 2.5.0
  

On the Cloudways blog they've posted a tutorial showing you how to create a simple contact form that emails when someone fills it out and the information they submitted.

Laravel is well known for providing multiple solutions for a problem. This is one of the main reasons of the popularity of the framework. Popular Laravel solutions cover routine functionality such as authentication, sessions, routing, and caching.

Contact Us forms are another routine functionality that is a requirement of more or less every website. In this article, I am going to demonstrate how you can easily create a contact form in Laravel with email. To understand the functionality of Laravel mail function. I suggest you read my previous article on sending emails in Laravel.

The author then walks you through the installation of a new Laravel application on the Cloudways service. He then shows how to install the "Form" package (laravelcollective/html) and enable it as a service provider. Next up comes the database configuration and the creation of the table to handle the data submitted via the "Contact Us" form. The model is then created to work with the table, the route is added to show the form (and handle the submission) as well as the matching view and controller. The post wraps up with the commands and configuration you'll need to send the emails and an example of a "mailable" class to handle the email's construction.

On the 9Lessons.info site they've posted a tutorial walking you through the creation of an application using Iconic 3, Angular 4 and a PHP restful API and how to handle user authentication and signup. It's a continuation from this previous post that kicked off the series.

Today’s post explains how to implement login authentication system for your AngularJS applications. It will show you how to log in with a user and store the user session, so it deals with token based authentication. Since we are using token based authentication, it protects if any unauthorized request is made and notices for a new login if required. This makes your application’s authentication to be more secured compared with any other authentication system. Every user details will be stored in an external database and a PHP based API is used in the backend for handling this authentication. Hope you’ll find it more easily using this as your authentication system in your AngularJS projects.

They assume you've worked through the previous post and already have the basic structure of the application set up. They share a screencast showing the process but also include the key details - database tables, code and markup - in the post for those that prefer to follow along that way.

On The Bakery (the CakePHP site) an official announcement has been posted welcoming Phinx to the CakePHP family. The Phinx library is a popular tool for framework-agnostic database migration handling.

We are very excited to announce that Phinx has joined the CakePHP team. The Github project has already been moved to the CakePHP organisation. The project itself will stay MIT-licensed but be gradually transformed into a Cake Software Foundation project. Other great news is that the current way to install and update Phinx remains unchanged.

As you are aware, CakePHP has been using Phinx since 3.0.0 for database migrations. The CakePHP Core team welcomes the opportunity to look after and maintain the project and will now start making changes to bring the code in line with the CakePHP (our) coding standards. As well as cleaning up issues and PR’s soon. We will be following up with our plans for the code and setting roadmaps in the coming weeks.

Rob Morgan, the original author of the library has also added some of his own commentary in a post to his site:

I’ve been busy lately. Juggling startups and open source work is no easy feat. I managed to do it for the past 5 years, but beyond 30 its proving to be more difficult. Phinx is not accelerating at the pace I’d like it to be. In fact so far this year we’ve only managed to ship 6 releases. I decided that the best strategy moving forwards is to find a new home for Phinx. One that has an active and loyal community and one that delivers great software. I’m pleased to announce that I’ve found the right fit.

He points out that the only real thing changing for now is the location of the repository. He looks back on the journey that got him and the project to where it is today and how much the support from the PHP community meant during that time.

Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:

• SitePoint PHP Blog: Being a Full Stack Developer (Update)

• Laravel News: Bring Laravel Collections to JavaScript with Collect.js
• SitePoint PHP Blog: What Is Snapshot Testing, and Is It Viable in PHP?
• SitePoint PHP Blog: Hello, Laravel? Communicating with PHP through Phone Calls!
• Madisoft Labs: Doctrine sharding
• Frederick Vanbrabant: The Broken Windows Theory or "Why Some Projects are Just Destined to Suck"
• Three Devs & A Maybe: Servers, Upgrades and a little Cryptocurrency
• Rob Allen: Simple way to add a filter to Zend-InputFilter
• TutsPlus.com: Dynamic Page Templates in WordPress, Part 3
• Marco Perone: Maybe in PHP
• Zend Framework: Convert objects to arrays and back with zend-hydrator
• Zend Developer Zone: June 2017 PHP Community (coffee) Cup of Service winner
• Mattias Noback: How to make Sculpin skip certain sources
• PHP.net: PHP 7.2.0 Alpha 2 Released
• Voices of the ElePHPant: Interview with Heather White (2)

The Zend Developer Zone has announce their "Coffee Cup of Service" winner for the month of June 2017: Sara Golemon.

It is time for the June 2017 PHP Community (coffee) Cup of Service award. This month it goes to someone who has been giving to PHP for more than 15 years, Ms. Sara Golemon.

Sara is a regular speaker at PHP conferences worldwide, an active core contributor, [and] one of the release managers of PHP 7.2.

Please join us here at Rogue Wave in saying thank you to Sara for her more than fifteen years of service to PHP and the PHP community.

This is the second winner of the "Coffee Cup of Service" winner with the first being Michelangelo van Dam himself who the award was inspired by.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast, hosted by community member Cal Evans, has posted their latest episode interviewing a member of the PHP community. In this latest show Cal welcomes back Heather White of All For One events. Unfortunately, due to recording conditions the audio on this episode is muffled at some points but the content is as great as always.

They talk about her presentation at CakeFest 2017 in New York City about stepping outside of your "comfort zone" and get up and present what you've learned (teaching). They also discuss mentorship and what can be done to become a mentor to those in your company, group or community. They also discuss how the overall community can help to train up the next "generation" of developers. They also mention the Coder Cruise conference, the speakers that'll be presenting and the other activities that will be happening on the cruise for families of attendees.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 for listening at your leisure. If you enjoy the show be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter to get the latest updates on new shows as they're released.