PHP is an approximately 800,000 lined C program. Like every program, it has been thought of as components/layers communicating with each other. This article will introduce and detail those layers – why they are there and what is their goal in PHP. We’ll also detail the life cycle: what happens in PHP when it starts, when a request comes in, and finally, when PHP shuts down. –by Julien Pauli

“Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 262144 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 4096 bytes) in FooBar.php at line 1”. Everyone has met this kind of error at least once in their PHP programmer life. What happened next? How and when does PHP allocate and free memory for you? How can you monitor this and take control over it? We’re going to answer all of these questions. The goal of this article is for you to have a global knowledge of how memory works within the system, how PHP deals with it, and how you can take control over all this through PHP and some helpful external tools. –by Julien Pauli

You all know $variables in PHP. Here, we’ll show how PHP manages those variables as you write your lines of code. We’ll see that our language is clever about memory management for variables, and it tries to do its best to have a low memory footprint. However, a full understanding of the model is needed if you don’t want PHP to do weird things such as copying them or not freeing them. This article will give you a solid understanding of the basics of variables in PHP. –by Julien Pauli

“Trust falls” are a team-building activity that some of my friends have had to endure. I’ve been threatened with this exercise a few times, but I’ve never had to do it. Luckily, I’ve been able to convince my team members I will participate without having to test their bicep and shoulder strength. Or, perhaps I’m just not trusting enough. –by Aaron Saray

In this article, you will be introduced to the Assetic package and how to use it to make deploying JavaScript and CSS assets in web apps simple and easy. We will work through a simple, one-page application, showing how to integrate Assetic with Silex for asset management. –by Matt Setter

A look at configuring and using caching in Laravel. Learn to add caching to new and existing classes unobtrusively. –by Dirk Merkel

The term ‘DevOps’ has become an extremely overloaded (or just misunderstood) term. –by Eli White

Grab your gear! Does everyone have a torch? Did anyone bring a ten foot pole? Join us on a journey to the center of our profession, the focal point of our community…the core of PHP. –by Beth Tucker Long