After 96 releases, 368 pull requests, and over 48 million downloads, I’m pleased to share that the next major version of league/commonmark 2.0.0 stable is now generally available! ?? You can install the latest version via Composer: composer require league/commonmark:^2.0 What’s new in 2.0? There’s so much to cover, but here are the key improvements and changes: Up to 50% faster and 21% less memory usage, especially when dealing with larger Markdown documents Three new extensions for Front Matter, Description Lists, and Default HTML Attributes A new XML renderer to simplify AST debugging Com ..read more

If you follow me on Twitter you might have noticed a fancy new banner image: This is powered by dynacover - a really nifty tool created by Erika Heidi that automagically generates and uploads dynamic Twitter banner images! I’m running a slightly modified instance with a custom template that updates every 10 minutes via cron. Currently, my banner is showing my recent Twitter followers as well as my GitHub sponsors, though I’m thinking of some other interesting things I can pull into it in the near future. Try it out Want to see it in action by having your avatar appear in my banner? Follow me ..read more

If you follow me on Twitter you’ve probably seen that I’ve recently joined Polywork - a new social network unlike any others. Polywork has a unique concept - instead of focusing on just your personal or professional life, your profile focuses on highlighting you as a multi-faceted individual. There’s no commenting, no competing for likes, no recruiters, no politics - just you and your story: I love how it presents my profile as a multi-faceted story with a timeline showing my personal growth and evolution over time. I’ve been busy adding different role changes, open-source releases, conferenc ..read more

With the 2.0.0 stable release of league/commonmark scheduled for next month, I'm pleased to share that the first 2.0 beta releases are now available! Current users of this library are highly encouraged to test this new branch and provide feedback. You can install the beta release via Composer: composer require league/commonmark:^2.0@beta What's new in 2.0? There's so much to cover - I'll likely need to write a separate blog post about that. But here are the key improvements and changes: Up to 50% faster and 21% less memory usage, especially when dealing with larger Markdown documents Three ..read more

I know this isn't a normal topic for this blog, but after helping a fellow player on a private Battlefield 5 forum I wanted to share the fix with the broader internet. Basically, if you have any of these in-game issues with in-squad VoIP: No sound at all Lots of static Low volume Sound coming from the wrong speakers There's a strong chance the issue is that your default communications device is not set to the right device in Windows' audio settings: I can't guarantee this will fix all squad chat problems in BF5, but hopefully it helps you ? (Teaser image from Unsplash ..read more

I'm excited to share that version 1.6.0 of league/commonmark has been released! This will be the last minor release of the 1.x branch - all efforts will now be focused on wrapping up development of 2.0.0! Please see https://commonmark.thephpleague.com/1.6/upgrading/ for important information about this release and the upcoming 2.0.0 version. If you'd like to help fund development of this library, please check out my Sponsor page. We also have some Markdown t-shirts and mugs on ModernGeekware.com: All proceeds go towards helping with the development and maintenance of this library. Hope you ..read more

The PHP RFC for enumerations just passed a 44-7 vote to be accepted as a new feature in the upcoming PHP 8.1 release! Enumerations, also known as "enums", are a special data type that can only contain specific, predefined (or "enumerated") values. They behave somewhat similar to constants, in that their names can be referenced in code, but they allow for stronger typing. The classic use case illustrated by the RFC is of an enum that defines different suits of playing cards: enum Suit { case Hearts; case Diamonds; case Clubs; case Spades; } From the RFC: This declaration creates a ne ..read more

As a developer, I LOVE my geeky t-shirts and mugs, but it's hard to find quality products with designs I like.  I've therefore been hard at work these last few weekends putting together my new project: www.moderngeekware.com I'm excited to share that ModernGeekware.com just launched this Sunday!  There are currently 28 products in the store and I hope to add more in the coming days and weeks.  Everything here was designed by me mostly because they're all things I'd want to buy and wear myself.  (In fact, I'm my own first customer!)  I figured perhaps others might ..read more

PHP 8.0 has just been released! This new major version adds several significant features and improvements to the language like attributes, match expressions, Just-In-Time compilation (JIT), and much more! Here's a brief guide on how to install PHP 8.0 on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X: Ubuntu PHP 8.0 and commonly-used extensions can be installed by adding Ondřej Surý's PPA: sudo apt install -y software-properties-common sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php sudo apt update You can then install PHP 8.0 with all common extensions and SAPIs like so: sudo apt install php8.0 Or you can specify ..read more

Composer 2 has been released with several great features and improvements! Best of all it's (mostly) backward-compatible with Composer 1. The one issue you're most likely to encounter when upgrading to Composer 2 is having Composer plugins that don't support this newer version yet. The ideal solution would be upgrading those plugins to newer versions (or submitting a feature request to the plugin developers to support Composer 2). But if that's not feasible you can actually co-install both Composer 1 and Composer 2 by following these steps: Step 1: Install Composer 1 separately Assuming you al ..read more