Summary: Lorna Jane Mitchell is back to show us some great reasons for upgrading your projects to PHP 5.3 or newer. Drupal 8's minimum version requirement is already up there at 5.4.5 (as of 2015.Feb.02), so we're doing well! Lorna and I have a quick chat about her history and experience, open source versus proprietary software development ("Projects and companies that work in that open source technology space make much better use of tools ... and they are wonderful, free, and well-supported tools!") ... specifics of how and why the PHP "Renaissance" is happening, and Drupal 8 as a PHP meta-project before she gets down to her jam's Drupal Camp presentation. I apologize for the slightly spotty quality of the audio and video in these recordings, the bandwidth doesn't seem to have been up to scratch when we recorded this. Now on to our session ... Session Description: New Wave PHP With new PHP versions being released more often, and projects including Drupal increasing their minimum requirements for PHP versions, it's clear that things are changing rapidly. This session is all about the changes introduced in newer versions of PHP (5.3 onwards), and what that means for PHP projects everywhere. There will be practical examples of the shiny new features, advice on finding hosting and safely upgrading existing projects, and news about the performance improvements you can expect as you move between the versions. The way PHP is evolving is truly exciting so come and join in on the fun! Session takeaways: PHP is a fabulous platform for a fabulous CMS and the new features and incrementing release numbers are totally a Good Thing. Let me show you some shiny and tell you how good the world is now :) Session Video Session Slides Presenter dossier Name: Lorna Jane Mitchell Twitter: @lornajane Website: http://lornajane.net Acquia.com guest author profile Work affiliation: Freelance, "I work where there are people who need me." Drupal/FOSS role: Project lead on joind.in, PHP writer and speaker, "I don’t know any Drupal but I keep finding excuses to hang out with the community." Current projects: Joind.in mainly, but I just had some contributions accepted to XHGui. When/which PHP you started with: PHP 4.2 in 2002 About: Lorna is a web development consultant and author based in Leeds, UK. Her books include "PHP Master", "PHP Web Services" and "N Ways To Be A Better Developer", and she loves to write for other outlets such as netmagazine and her own blog http://www.lornajane.net. When she's not writing either code or words for a living, Lorna leads the Joind.In open source project; a tool to enable communities to give real-time, public feedback to speakers and organizers of events. Lorna has spoken at events around the world giving both keynotes and technical talks and is available for hire on interesting projects. Podcast Interview Video
