CMS Scanner is a security tool from Open Security crew that you can host locally and use for security scans of WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and vBulletin websites. I think that having an automated tool like that is way better and more productive than a thousand blog posts on how to secure your installation of a particular software.
PHP 7.3 is scheduled to be released on December 6th, 2018. As always, it’ll bring a few changes and new features (read more about it here or here). But it’ll also bring a significant performance improvement. Here are the results of a few benchmarks. Long story short:
PHP 7.3 is just shy of 10% faster than PHP 7.2 in the popular PHPBench. PHP 7.3 is 31% faster than PHP 7.0 or nearly 3x the speed of PHP5.
Bring it on, I say!
I’ve been working with REST/RESTful APIs for a while now. They are usually a lot better than the SOAP or XML-RPC stuff we had before. But they are also not perfect. Error handling and reporting is a common area between many implementations that needs more attention and consistency. Turns out, there is, I’ve just somehow never heard of it – RFC7807 defines “Problem Details for HTTP APIs”.
I’ll need to look more into this and see if and how it is better than a variety of things I’m using now. Gladly, there is even a PHP library to help with that – Crell/ApiProblem:
This library provides a simple and straightforward implementation of the IETF Problem Details for HTTP APIs, RFC 7807.
RFC 7807 is a simple specification for formatting error responses from RESTful APIs on the web. This library provides a simple and convenient way to interact with that specification. It supports generating and parsing RFC 7807 messages, in both JSON and XML variants.
An innocent joke on Facebook brought in something really golden – Stack Overflow Buddy. It is a fun PHP library for all those of you who search for code examples on Stack Overflow and then copy-paste those into your projects.
Wow, how’s it work?
If you’re impressed, you should probably stop reading here.
- Split the camelCased function call into words
- Grab the top scoring PHP tagged questions with those words in the title from StackOverflow’s API
- Grab the top scoring answers for those questions
- Pull any and all code blocks from those answers
- Find the first code block that:
- Inteprets without error
- Contains one or more functions
- One of the functions has the same amount of arguments as were passed by the user
- Then we throw caution to the wind, eval, and call the new method!
This is absolutely brilliant!
“What’s something very few people know about PHP?” blog post (and Quora answer) provides some more impressive stats and links about the popularity of the PHP programming language.
This goes well with this recent post.