You've read the release notes. You've seen the blog posts. But how many of PHP's modern features have actually made it into your day-to-day code? Sure, you've heard about enums. You might've even dabbled with match expressions or readonly properties. But chances are, you're still writing modern PHP with a very 7.x mindset.

This talk is your invitation to ditch the boilerplate and embrace the features modern PHP has given us. We'll walk through a set of underused gems - from union types and readonly classes, to cleaner control flow, and smarter typing.

Expect before/after code, real-world scenarios, and the occasional 'wait, you can do that now?' moment. Whether you're modernising a legacy app or just looking to write less code that does more, this session will leave you with a better understanding of how these features combine to make your code safer, more expressive, and easier to maintain.

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Good pace, humor, and topic selection. Solid refresher even for advanced developers.

Bill Tressler at 15:15 on 19 May 2026

This talk was highly informative with just enough comic relief

Ryan Howe at 09:44 on 20 May 2026

Great talk, just to have some visibility into some of the new features helps to give a push to the keep moving the php version we are using moving forward.

Chris Lemon at 13:18 on 21 May 2026

Well presented, good information but alas it was all things I was already familiar with. Probably great for folks who haven't had the opportunity to see what recent versions of PHP have to offer.

This was the most immediately helpful talks of the conference for me. I could take the content and immediately put it into practice in my work.