Solr Power for All, Part 2

In Solr Power for All Part 1 (see the July 2015 issue), we took a high-level look at Apache Solr’s configuration and its capabilities. In this article, we will look at the real-world application for search in a social network, on a support forum, and around the office. by Benjamin Greenaway

Dissecting the PHAR Format

PHAR archives provide a way to package entire PHP applications, including all dependencies, in a single file. In recent years their use has been popularized throughout the PHP community, especially for command line tools such as Composer, as they are easy to distribute. In this article we will dissect the PHAR format to learn how PHAR archives are logically organized, what types of containers can be used, how to sign them to verify that the file has not been modified by malicious users, and whether or not there is a performance impact for using PHAR archives. Sound interesting? by Raul Fraile

Artificial Neural Networks with PHP

Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) are one of the ways in which computers become “intelligent” and capable of, in a way, learning. We can use them with PHP. In this article, I’ll cover the basics of ANN (what they are, what they are used for, their composition, and learning/training) and how we can use them with PHP through a sample tic-tac-toe game using Symfony’s Console component (with an small intro to this component and its helpers) and libfann. by Eduardo Gulias Davis

Casting Tales in PHP

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As a dynamically typed language, working with data types in PHP can sometimes seem like a dark art. This article will discuss some of the trade-offs inherent to PHP and delve into some of the strangest behaviors my team has debugged while developing a high-volume PHP application. by Zachary Drillings

Leveling Up: What’s Coming in PHP 7

In just a few weeks, PHP 7 will be released to the world. At the time of this writing, PHP 7 RC 3 is out, and RC 4 will be out by the time you’re reading this. The plan is to release PHP 7 in November. There are a number of new features and functions included with PHP 7 that we’ll talk about, as well as a few backward-compatibility breaks that you’ll want to be aware of when upgrading to PHP 7. by David Stockton

Education Station: How to Convert a WordPress Blog to Sculpin

In this month’s column—a follow-up to last month’s introduction—I’m going to show you the essentials of the process I went through recently when I converted my freelance site from WordPress to Sculpin. by Matthew Setter

Community Corner: October 2015

This month, we look at how to contribute to HaPHPy Birthday, have a chat with Stefan Koopmanschap, and roundup notable community events. by Joe Devon

finally{}: “Isn’t PHP Dead?”

It should be fairly obvious to readers of this column what my feelings about this are: no, of course it’s not! So why is that statement this month’s title? Because this seems to be a common refrain heard outside of the PHP community. by Eli White