Watching PHPverse 2026 right now

I’m currently tuned into the PHPverse 2026 livestream.

It’s a JetBrains run PHP event, and it’s mostly focused on how the ecosystem is evolving in a very practical direction less hype, more “how do we actually maintain and modernize real world PHP codebases?”

What stands out so far is how much attention is going into tooling and long term maintainability rather than new language features alone.

A PHP documentary is coming

One of the more surprising announcements is that a PHP documentary is on the way. That alone says a lot about where the language is now PHP has clearly reached a point where its history and evolution are interesting enough to document properly.

Tool I didn’t know about: PHPRector

I also ended up learning about a tool I hadn’t come across before, PHPRector. Funny enough, I only heard about it through chat, but it immediately caught my attention.

It is basically aimed at automated refactoring and upgrading legacy PHP codebases to more modern standards. That’s exactly the kind of thing that matters if you’ve ever dealt with older PHP projects that need version upgrades without breaking everything.