Video version at https://youtu.be/REjWp_2Dt30 Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) provides us with a set of basic methods to describe what our request is doing. Generally, we’re working with GET or POST requests, but these have limitations on them that you won’t be aware of until you’ve run headlong into one of them. The best example is […]

🎙️ PHP Podcast – July 9, 2026 Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon | Guest: Holly Schilling A PHP RFC for extension methods that PHP definitely should have had by now. 👋 Holly Schilling, Uninvited but Welcome Holly was originally just planning to heckle from the Discord chat room. She had about 45 minutes’ […]

For twenty-plus years, “deploying PHP” meant the same uneasy triangle: Apache or Nginx in front, PHP-FPM behind, and a configuration file glued between them that nobody on the team really understood. FrankenPHP is the first genuinely different answer that stack has had in a long time, and after a couple of years of steady releases […]

Caleb Porzio shipped Livewire v4 in January 2026, and it’s not a minor bump. The release introduces islands architecture, single-file components as the default format, scoped styles, built-in drag-and-drop sorting, and a suite of optimistic UI directives that make your interfaces feel instant. If you’ve been building with Livewire v3, the upgrade path is smooth […]

🎙️ PHP Podcast – July 2, 2026 Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon Eric’s new laptop won’t share its screen. John lost a fight with a leaf blower. PHP 8.6 alpha dropped. 100+ people showed up to make PHP seem cool again. Normal show. 🖥️ Eric’s Fresh Install and the Screen That Wouldn’t Share […]

Video version: https://youtu.be/uVKXmqYVjpQ One of the more powerful features of AI-assisted development is that you can put multiple AI coding agents to work simultaneously with little effort. For example, you might have one building a new feature, one cleaning up an old API endpoint, and a third drafting a blog post. If the agents share […]

Recursive CTEs in MySQL let you query trees, org charts, and nested categories in a single query. Here’s how to use them effectively with PHP. Every PHP developer eventually hits the “tree problem.” You have categories with subcategories, employees with managers, comments with replies, or menu items with children — and you need to query […]

Terminal UIs have had a quiet renaissance in the developer tools world. From Lazygit to btop, the era of the ugly text-only CLI is giving way to rich, interactive interfaces built entirely in the terminal. PHP developers have historically been left out of this movement — our CLI tooling was functional but rarely beautiful. That […]

MySQL’s JSON column type has been around since version 5.7, but it’s one of those features where the gap between “I know it exists” and “I know when and how to use it well” is surprisingly wide. Used correctly, JSON columns give you schema flexibility exactly where you need it. Used poorly, they become a […]

🎙️ PHP Podcast – June 25, 2026 Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon Eric and John are back. Sara and Holly did a better job. Eric’s computer still hates him. 🔌 Eric’s Connectivity Saga: A Possible Resolution For weeks, Eric has been dealing with a maddening streaming issue — he could see and hear […]