We were all waiting for it and many of us have been working hard for the last four years to make it happen. Today, Symfony 2.3.0 is available and this is the first long-term support release for Symfony version 2. I'm so happy that we were able to achieve this important milestone in the life of the framework. THANK YOU for making it possible. [...] That gives us the best of two different worlds: small teams and agile companies can benefit from the latest features by upgrading every six months (they have two months to upgrade); large teams and traditional companies can standardize on a release. [...] And 2.3.0 is our first long term support release. We, the community, are going to maintain it for the next three years (until May 2016).

The post includes some statistics about this latest release as well as some of the new features that come along with it. For those that want to upgrade right away, there's also some instructions on what to change in your "composer.json" file to try it all out.

ZendCon PHP 2013 will be the place where European PHP professionals gather this fall. [...] Attend Europe's largest conference focusing on Enterprise PHP solutions, Frameworks, PHP Training and all things PHP. Meet the legends who created PHP and are partly responsible for what the WWW looks like today. Whether you wish to find a job, take PHP training, find a services company to help you, or just meet the greatest developer ecosystem ever -You are in the right place!

The event will be held in Paris, France on November 18th through the 20th at the Marriott Rive Gauche. Following the same pattern as the US version of the conference, the first day will be tutorials with regular sessions the following days. It's still pretty early on so there's no details about the Call for Papers or anything yet, but you can sign up for more information on the current conference site.

I recently had a problem with a ZF2 based website where users were reporting seeing the error page displayed, but I couldn't reproduce in testing. To find this problem I decided to log every exception to a file so I could then go back and work out what was happening. In a standard ZF2 application, the easiest way to do this is to add a listener to the 'dispatch.error' event and log using ZendLog.

He uses an event listener to attach a service that contains a "logException" method. This method uses the ZendLog component to write out the error message to a local log file including a backtrace of where the issue occurred.

In this episode we talk to Adam Culp on his very first day as a Zend employee. We talk about PHP community and Adam's decision to move from the realm of independent consultant to Zender! Adam is the organizer of SunshinePHP, PHP Guru and joining the Zend Professional Services Team.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. You can also subscribe to their feed of you want this and future episodes pulled automatically.

This is the 3rd set of Zend Certification Tips and Advice to help anyone taking either of the two Zend Exams powered by Zend Technologies: the Zend PHP Certification Exam and/or the Zend Framework Certification Exam. The aim being to help people who want to sit for those exams and inform them what it is all about & what to expect by hearing it from (pro) PHP Guys who have already been through it, that is => Hear It From Zend Certified Engineers!

He starts off with some general questions to Eric about the exam and its structure and how he prepared himself for it. He mentions some of the resources he used to study and what kind of topics to pay attention to. There's also a few quotes included at the end giving another perspective on the exam (specifically, some frustrations).

Both ZF2 and Symfony 2 offer the same behavior: if I'm in a controller, and I want to use a service, I have to get it from the container with $this->get('my_service'). As such, the controller is not using DI, this is the service locator pattern. Controllers become more difficult to tests because of that, and they depend on the container now. I wonder why both frameworks didn't go further: why not treat controllers like services and use dependency injection on them. In other words: if a controller needs a service "A", then it should get it in the constructor, or through setter/property injection.

The comments talk some about the "controller from the DI container" idea, some other ways around the problem and some clarification as to what the frameworks are actually doing related to the container injection.

I previously talked about the terms I use for objects in the model layer and now it's time to put some code on those bones. Note that,as always, all code here is example code and not production-ready.

He includes sample classes related to his "books" examples - a "book" entity (with title, author, id and ISBN), a mapper object to load/save/delete the entity and a service object that provides an interface for the entity to the rest of the application.

Cal Evans has been referred to as "The Ubiquitous Face of the PHP Community". That's made Cal an obvious choice for the first guest on the PHPPodcast. In this episode we chat about the evolving face of the PHP community.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

I currently use a very simple set of core objects within my model layer: entities, mappers and service objects. [...] I dislike the phrase "service object" as the word "service" means so many things to so many people. I haven't heard a better phrase yet that everyone understands though.

He defines each of the types of objects to help make the separation clearer. Here they are in brief:

• Entities are objects that represent something in my business logic.
• Mappers know how to save and load an entity from the data store.
• Service objects provide the API that the rest of the application uses.

Some of the comments on the post relate his choices to use in Zend Framework v2-based applications, noting that there are some base components you can extend to create these kinds of objects.

This is the 2nd set of Zend Certification Tips and Advice to help anyone taking either of the two Zend Exams powered by Zend Technologies: the Zend PHP Certification Exam and/or the Zend Framework Certification Exam. The aim being to help people who want to sit for those exams and inform them what it is all about & what to expect by hearing it from (pro) PHP Guys who have already been through it, that is => Hear It From Zend Certified Engineers!

They start with a little background on her and her experience with PHP and get quickly into the questions about the exam. Topics include things like:

• What the test is about and hopes to achieve
• Some things you can do to prepare
• A recommendation to make the most of your time exploring topics you might be weak in
• Whether or not the ZCE training classes help in the learning process

You can read the rest of the interview here.