🎙️ PHP Podcast – September 17, 2026

Hosts: Joe Ferguson, Sara Golemon & John Congdon

The September issue shipped 13 days early, a blue elephant named Eric raised eyebrows, PHP 8.6 is racing GTA 6 to a November launch, and a CDN bug taught us all a lesson about cache keys. Also: a lot of World of Warcraft.

🗞️ The September Issue Ships Early (and the Blue Elephant Situation)
The September issue of PHP Architect went live on the day of recording, roughly 13 days ahead of the usual schedule. Joe credited a flood of feature articles from the community, columnists turning work in early, and editor Jackie’s first pass for keeping the whole company-wide review process ahead of the game. If you’d like to write for the magazine, they pay real cash in American denominations — just head to phparch.com.

Attention quickly turned to the cover, which featured a distinctly blue elephant that the crew agreed had strong “Eric” energy. It came out that this was Jackie’s first attempt at managing the AI-generated cover art, which sparked plenty of teasing about who exactly the human-in-the-loop was. The team also teased upcoming pet shirts and cat socks for the swag store.

📻 PHP Foundation Community Hour Launches
Joe highlighted the brand-new PHP Foundation Community Hour, a podcast produced by PHP Architect and recorded live on the same network as this show. It has its own dedicated RSS feed alongside the usual channels — find it under the podcasts section on the website.

The first episode featured Elizabeth Barron interviewing Matt Stauffer about his blog post on contributing to PHP. Sara praised Matt as a great addition to the Foundation Board, and the crew noted his deep experience getting people to contribute to open source projects, plus his well-known Laravel: Up & Running book. The next episode lands next month with another guest on the theme of contributing to PHP.

🎬 The PHP Documentary and 8.6 vs. GTA 6
Sara shared that she finally recorded her interview for the upcoming PHP documentary — filmmaker Jeremy came right to her apartment in Lisbon to shoot it. She’s since seen an hour-long cut and teased that it covers a bit of PHP history, the people involved, and the good and bad choices made along the way. Release timing is still fuzzy, somewhere between one and three months out.

On the release side, Holly noted developer beta 3 is out with the RC approaching, at which point she’ll start pushing her RFCs out for discussion and voting. Joe revealed the general release date: Thursday, November 19th, PHP 8.6.0 — the very same day a small indie title called Grand Theft Auto 6 arrives. The last of the 8.6 deprecations only just merged, so even beta 3 didn’t have everything yet.

🌐 The CDN Bug That Cached the Wrong Homepage
Joe walked through a genuinely wild bug on php.net’s new CDN. Bot traffic throwing URL-encoded sequences like %2F, %5C, and %3F caused the CDN to normalize those junk paths down to a single forward slash — and then use that as the cache key, overwriting the homepage cache with 301s, 302s, and 404s. The effect was localized to whichever CDN nodes the bot swarm happened to hit, which made it maddening to reproduce.

Sara pointed out the CDN was actually doing something reasonable in normalizing the path; the real bug was serving a different page than the one you’d get requesting the root. Joe praised the provider’s support team, who confirmed the issue, escalated it to engineering, and validated his mitigation of disabling caching for those status codes. The conversation broadened into how AI crawlers and more sophisticated, high-unique-IP bot traffic are surfacing long-dormant bugs — and the uncomfortable centralization that comes from everyone hiding behind the same few CDN providers.

📱 Foldables, Front-End, and the WoW Detour
Holly kicked off a discussion about Apple’s new foldable device and what it means for front-end design. Her core gripe: mobile screens already lose vertical space to status bars, nav bars, ad bars, and tab bars, so a wider aspect ratio can make things worse. She praised Apple for moving native app navigation off to the side to reclaim vertical space, but noted that does nothing for web pages — which she argues most responsive designs still don’t handle well, especially on 16:9 Android tablets.

Joe weighed in from a consumer angle, worrying about hinge durability on $2,000 foldables and whether they’ll last the three-to-four years he now expects from a phone. Somewhere in between, the show detoured hard into gaming — WoW Classic “Forever,” the November 4th launch, tank builds, and even the naming of shadow priests — before circling back to remind everyone you can, in fact, write MMOs in PHP.

Links from the show:

• PHP Architect — September issue now live
• PHP Tech 2027 — Early bird tickets (April 27–29, 2027, Chicago)
• PHP Tech 2027 CFP — Open until October 31
• First PHP Community Hour Podcast
• Join the live show on Discord

Host:

Joe Ferguson

• Mastodon: @joepferguson@phpc.social
• PHPArch.me: @svpernova09

Sara Golemon

• Mastodon: @pollita@phpc.social

Holly Schilling

• Mastodon: @TheCodeLorax@tech.lgbt

Streams:

• • Youtube Channel
  • Twitch

📬 Connect & Hire

Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review.

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Music Provided by Epidemic Sound

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