MergePHP, November 2025

Last week, I presented "PHP 8.5: New Features from the Source" for a second time, this time through MergePHP, an online meetup combining multiple PHP user groups. The talk generally went better than it did the previous time I presented on that topic, at Longhorn PHP.

I ran into a few technical issues, but they were not problems that I could have easily foreseen, and I'm happy with how I handled them. The content was based on the slides for Longhorn, but I addressed the topics in a much better order than last time, where I focused on the deprecations and didn't have enough time to discuss the new features in depth.

Longhorn Updates

I started working on the slides for my presentation the week before the talk. Given that I gave a presentation on the same topic at LongHorn PHP, I began with a copy of the slides from that presentation, before incorporating the lessons I learned giving the talk the first time:

• Instead of starting with deprecations, and ending with new features, I put the new features at the start. Previously, the best/most impactful features were the last few slides (saving the best for last), but for MergePHP I reversed both the order of the features discussed and the relative order of the features and the deprecations, starting the talk with the features that are the most impactful. I also went through and adjusted the order to better match how they would be discussed.
• I removed some of the deprecation slides that would likely impact the fewest people, while requiring the most detail to explain what changed. Specifically, the slides from LongHorn discussing the deprecation of building the LDAP extension with Oracle support, the removal of ODBC support for direct driver integration and old versions of ODBC.

I also made sure to update the one example snippet that used the string "LonghornPHP" to instead use "MergePHP".

The day before the talk, I also went through a final time and checked if any of the tooling commits marked as "PENDING" (merged but not yet included in any release) had been released since I last checked. I'm glad I did a last minute round of checks, since I was able to incorporate references to PHPStan version 2.1.32, which was released 2 days before my talk.

The Talk

I think the talk went fairly well from a presentation side, but I did have some technical difficulties. At first, my microphone refused to connect at all, and I had to reboot my laptop right before the talk started - thankfully, the organizers were able to chat a bit to fill the air. Within a few minutes, I was able to connect and be heard.

During the talk, however, the microphone cut out a few times. Once the microphone was working again, I would go back and repeat myself, but because I wasn't staring at the live chat, I didn't realize the microphone had cut out right away, and probably missed some stuff when I went back, or repeated some of the content that I had already covered when my microphone resumed working. I'm not sure what else I could have done - its not like I was in a moving car on a mobile hotspot, I was just sitting at home!

The talk lasted around an hour, which is what I had expected. But, for the next time I am scheduled to give this talk, at ConFoo, the alloted time is 45 minutes, including 10 minutes for questions. I'll need to cut down a lot of the material.

Preparing for ConFoo

That trimming starts now - I started my slides for ConFoo with a copy of the MergePHP ones, and removed the following slides:

• "Deprecated: function aliases"
• "Deprecated: no-op $exclude_disabled"
• "Deprecated: SplObjectStorage aliases"
• "Deprecated: unregistering all autoloaders"
• "Deprecated: finfo_buffer() $context"
• "Deprecated: openssl_pkey_derive() $key_length"
• "Deprecated: driver-specific PDO parts"

These all covered relatively straightforward deprecations, like replacing an alias with the underlying function or method. There were also a lot of slides about these deprecations, and so not talking about an entire category of deprecations should allow me to cut a significant amount of time.

I next removed a few slides about deprecations that were unlikely to impact most developers or otherwise would take up an inordinate amount of time to cover:

• "Deprecated: existing warnings elevated" - some behavior that triggered warnings is officially deprecated, but the warning messages are still logged as E_WARNING, which is considered stronger than a deprecation. The change was primarily to update the warning messages to indicate that the behavior would result in an error in PHP 9. The circumstances triggering the warning were unchanged.
• "Deprecated: PDO Pgsql transaction constants" - given that the pdo/pgsql extension never exposed transaction state, it is unlikely that anyone was trying to use the transaction-related constants. I tried to find any uses of these constants on GitHub, but after filtering for unarchived non-fork repos with code in PHP, all uses that I found were either false positives or related to testing.
• "Deprecated: __sleep() and __wakeup()" - while a hard deprecation here would definitely impact a significant group of PHP developers, a late-landing RFC converted the hard deprecation (emitting deprecation warnings) to a soft deprecation (updating documentation to indicate deprecation, but no warnings). If and when the hard deprecation returns, it would warrant discussion, but as things stand for PHP 8.5 the time it would take to explain how to update to a different serialization system could be better spent on other 8.5 changes.
• "Deprecated: PDO 'uri:' scheme" - most developers are probably not fetching the information about what database to connect to from somewhere else on the internet, and I don't want to give people any ideas.
• "Deprecated: output handler problems" - since the deprecation of the return value from an output handler not being a string was reverted as part of PHP 8.5.0 RC5, the only thing left is the deprecation of trying to emit output within an output handler function. Doing so will trigger a clear error message, and the mitigation procedure is simple - remove the attempt to produce output.

This first round of cuts brought me from 50 slides to 38 - I'll still need to cut some of what I have planned, but I've made significant progress in trimming down the talk.

If you are curious about the content of the removed slides, or any of the others, a copy of my MergePHP presentation is here on my site. After I give this talk at ConFoo the slides I use for that will also be available.

Looking Ahead

I'll continue to work on the talk between now and ConFoo. PHP 8.5 comes with a lot of new features - that is a good problem to have. As a release manager, and as the author of five of the RFCs implemented in PHP 8.5, I'm very familiar with a lot of the changes, which can lead to me going into more detail than needed when discussing the features. For ConFoo, I'll plan to bring speaker notes with which slides deserve more background discussion, and which slides I should avoid delving too deep on.