On the Symfony blog today Fabien Potencier talks about some small things that matter - some of the smaller updates that have been made to the Symfony 2 framework recently that have helped to make it better and more flexible.

Every new Symfony release tries to brings some small but useful improvements. Let's dive into some of them for Symfony 2.3 (in no particular order).

Things in his list include:

• A text-based output of the exception handling stack trace
• A default configuration for the Serializer component
• The ability to run the framework in a production environment in development
• An update to make debugging configuration parameters easier
• Conversion process of short controller names
• Overload generated code in the bundle bootstrapping code

Check out the post for the rest of the changes on his list and check out the RC1 of Symfony 2.3.0 to see some of them in action.

On the PHP.net site they've announced the release of version 5.4.15 & 5.3.25 (fully released after some propagation issues with the mirror servers).

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.15 and PHP 5.3.25. These releases fix about 10 bugs aswell as upgrading the bundled libmagic library. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.15. [...] The list of changes are recorded in the ChangeLog.

Changes include updates to debug_backtrace for a segfault issue, a change to the dns_get_record function for negative length values and a fix for a fd leak on Solaris. You can download this latest release from the downloads section (source) or the Windows QA site (binaries).

As is mentioned on the main PHP.net site today PHP 5.4.14 and 5.3.24 have been released:

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.14 and PHP 5.3.24. These releases fix about 10 bugs aswell as upgrading the bundled PCRE library. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.14.

Users are encouraged to update to this latest release. You can find the latest version either on the downloads page (source) or the Windows site (binaries). If you're curious what all changed in this release, check out the Changelog.

On the Symfony blog there's a post from Ryan Weaver about an upcoming event the project is hosting and how you can help - the Symfony Docs Hack Day (on March 30th).

The first commit to the Symfony documentation was over 3 years ago, and since then, we've grown to include a full book, lots of cookbook entries, and sections for most of the individual components. [...] But as we grow, we want to stay aggressive and continue to improve the quality of the docs. This means ensuring that code examples are accurate and pages are easy to understand, balancing the info you need with excess technical clutter. [...] And this is where we need your help! Whether you're a seasoned-Symfony veteran, a beginner, or even if you don't think your English is very good, we'd like you to join us on March 30th for our first ever Symfony Docs Hack Day.

The event is a virtual one - everyone will meet up on the Freenode IRC network in the #symfony-docs channel on March 30th from 9am through 5pm Central EU time. Everyone's invited, not just those who are experts in the framework. Documentation updates are a great way to learn more about a framework too! If you're interested in what kind of updates they're looking for, check out this list of open issues with the docs on Github.

Jordi Boggiano has a new post to his site about a recent update to the Composer tool that can help make managing development-only dependencies a bit easier.

Using require-dev in Composer you can declare the dependencies you need for development/testing. It works in most simple cases, but when the dev dependencies overlap with the regular ones, it can get tricky to handle. In too many cases it also tends to just fail at resolving dependencies with quite strange error messages. Since this was quite unreliable, I set out to rework the whole feature this week-end. The patch has been merged, and it fixes six open issues which is great.

Additionally, to make it easier to work with the development dependencies, they'll by default be installed when you run an "update" in your repository. If you don't want them, you can still use "--no-dev". Also, Composer will manage them in a seperate section from the normal "require" packages. If you're not using Composer to manage your application's dependencies, look over on getcomposer.org for more details.

On PHP.net today they've announced the release of PHP 5.4.12 and 5.3.22, the latest versions of the two current release branches.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.12 and PHP 5.3.22. These releases fix about 10 bugs. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.12.

It's a bug fix release, but everyone's encouraged to update. It corrects things in core, FPM, sqlite, PDO_OCI, the Zend Engine and date functionality (and a bit more). You can get this latest version from the downloads page or windows.php.net for the Windows binaries. If you'd like to see the full list of issues fixed, check out the Changelog.

In this new post to his site Aaron McGowan talks about new features of the upcoming PHP 5.5 release - the "finally" keyword and generators.

PHP 5.5 has recently been released as an ALPHA release, meaning there are still bugs, code is being tested and features being added. With the 5.5 release, many of us PHP developers have a few wonderful new features that we should be taking advantage of almost immediately.

He gives brief introductions to these two new features, including some code examples (but getting a bit more into the generators side of things). You can find out more about these two features and how to implement them when PHP 5.5 comes around from the PHP sitel: generators and finally (actually from the PHP wiki).

The Codeception testing tool has released a new major update with some interesting new features - the expected feature for generating code coverage reports (similar to other tools) but there's also the idea of "remote code coverage" introduced.

There is no magic in local codecoverage. XDebug and PHP_CodeCoverage libraries do their job. The tricky thing is remote codecoverage. We attach small script into application's front controller. When a special header is sent this script starts to collect coverage information. And in the end of tests, this data is merged, serialized and sent back to Codeception. So you can test and collect coverage report even on staging servers in real environment.

They also mention a few other updates in the release - new Redis and MongoDb modules, UX improvements and the normal bugfixes. You can find out more about the code coverage feature in their manual or just about the project in general from the main site.

As Chris Jones has posted on his Oracle blog, there's been a recent update to the Underground PHP and Oracle Manual with a complete refresh of content from more recent versions of the powerful database.

The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual is designed to bridge the gap between the many PHP scripting language and the many Oracle Database books available. It contains unique material about PHP's OCI8 extension for Oracle Database, and about other components in the PHP-Oracle ecosystem. It shows PHP developers how to use PHP and Oracle together, efficiently and easily.

Updates include new content related to the Oracle XE 11g release and the latest updates to their OCI8 extension for PHP. Other updates include information about using PHP with Oracle TimesTen, NetBeans and Oracle Tuxedo as well as getting PHP installed on the Oracle Solaris operating system.

For the MySQL users out there, PHPMaster.com has a new tutorial showing you how to use triggers in your database to perform automatic actions on things like "before update" or "after insert".

By making MySQL do more work through triggers, the PHP side of my project was greatly simplified. So, it is the intention of this article to give you some insight into the creation and usage of MySQL triggers, so that by the end of this reading you can make use of them in your own projects.

They start by explaining what triggers are and how they're created on the database side (with an example syntax). They apply one to a more practical situation - helping keep data integrity on a revenue table based on the data inserted into an events tracking table. Their trigger ("CostCalc") calculates the time of the event on update and updates the revenue table with the correct cost. Also included is the sample PHP code (an "EventHandler") that updates the event records. The trigger fires transparently in the background with no need for the PHP script to make any additional calls.