Blog

PHP 7.4 has just been released with several new features! Learn how to install it on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and more.

Is "Social Delegation" (someone the user trusts) the next factor in MFA?

After 5 years of development, 3,000,000 downloads, and 58 releases, I’m extremely pleased to announce that league/commonmark version 1.0.0 has been released!

What is league/commonmark?

This weekend I’ve tagged the first pre-releases of the 1.x branch! I strongly encourage everyone to test their applications and extensions against this beta and provide any feedback. (Helpful information can be found in the upgrading guide.) Unless there are any major issues we’ll plan on releasing a stable 1.0.0 version in the coming weeks!

And if you’d like to support this project, please consider sponsoring development via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/colinodell

A cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability was found in the PHP League’s CommonMark library (league/commonmark) versions 0.15.6 through 0.18.x before 0.18.1. It allows remote attackers to insert unsafe URLs into <a> tags (even if allow_unsafe_links is false) by adding an encoded newline character in the middle (e.g., writing javascript as javascri%0Apt).

Version 0.18.1 has been released to fix this issue. All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to this version.

PHP 7.3 has been released, bringing some great new features to the language such as trailing commas in function calls, throwing errors when JSON parsing fails, array_key_first() / array_key_last() functions, and much more!

Here’s a brief guide on how to install PHP 7.3 on Linux, Windows, and OS X:

Ubuntu

I’m pleased to share that my PHP 7 Upgrade Guide ebook has been featured in the Ultimate Programmer Super Stack bundle! This is a hand-curated collection of 25+ premium ecourses, bestselling ebooks, and bonus resources that will help new programmers:

• Learn a wide range of today’s most popular (and lucrative) languages and frameworks, including everything from Python, JavaScript, and Ruby, to HTML, CSS, and Kotlin, and more…
• Discover how to build APIs, websites, and iOS and Android applications from scratch

This month I released updates for a few of my open-source projects including league/commonmark, league/html-to-markdown, and colinodell/json5.

Prevent Composer from updating your Symfony components to unsupported versions with the colinodell/symfony-lts-or-current metapackage.

After using phpbrew to manage my local PHP versions for a while, I got tired of re-compiling PHP after every release and decided to install multiple PHP versions side-by-side with Ondřej Surý’s PPA. One of the features I missed from phpbrew was the ability to run a command like phpbrew use php-7.2.8 to automatically change the php command to that version, so I ended up implementing this feature myself using symlinks and shell aliases.

Switching PHP Versions