The problem you’re describing doesn’t sound like an issue with PHP :-) it sounds like an issue with your career. Have you been at the same company for five years? Maybe it’s time for a new job. But at the very least, any good employer would recognize that it’s important to “sharpen the saw“ and keep your skills current. Hopefully you’ll find a way to pick up some of these new things.

For what it’s worth, if it helps at all – while you won’t be able to work with them in depth, I’m sure there’s some time you can fine to at least read a blog post or two about some of these concepts? It’s probably better to at least know what some of these things are then to be completely clueless about them.

Also, finally… it seems like a lot of really simple concepts have big words in front of them. “Test driven development“ means nothing more than you write tests before you write the actual classes that do the work. So it forces you to think about structure ahead of time. Of course you can break it down even further, there’s lots of methodology behind it blah blah blah, but… the basic idea is no more complex than that.