Automated Rsync - Without Compromising Security
Rsync is one of the most popular tools to synchronize data between two computers, and used mostly in taking backups using this sync feature. It’s easy to use and only uploads the changed files when a sync is necessary, so it’s effective in saving bandwidth and time too. Here is a quick work around that you can implement in your remote machine to prevent the connecting user from doing anything malicious, only those tasks that are needed to perform the rsync backup. 

Horizontal Scaling of PHP Apps Part 2
In Part 1, Bruno discussed the horizontal scaling of the application layer – scaling out servers to handle the PHP code concurrently via load balancers and other means. He covered sharing of local data, touched on potential optimisation and explained the basics of load balancers. The application layer, however, isn’t the only thing that needs scaling. With a bigger demand for the app, the demand for higher read/write operations on the database also surfaces. In this part, we’ll look at scaling the database, explain replication and cover some common pitfalls you might want to avoid.

Sending Confirmation Emails with Phalcon and Swift
Today, sending emails is considered the basic functionality of any web application. Usually, an email is sent to notify the user of some kind of activity that has taken place on the website, such as when he registers the account, updates information, or when new friends have been found. In this short tutorial, Thien Tran Duy shows how to send emails via Gmail quickly from within a Phalcon sample application. 

Arbitrary Precision and Big Numbers in PHP
In this article on sitepoint.com, Taylor Ren reviews the PHP capability to provide arbitrary precision number calculation/big integer calculation by reviewing 3 PHP modules: GMP, BC Math and php-bignumbers. He will demonstrate two real-world examples to see the powers/limitations of each. The first one will be calculating PI to arbitrary precision – (for the sake of the article, precision will be restricted to 1000 digits); the second will be a simple demonstration on RSA encryption/decryption.

Easy Setter Injection in Zend Framework 2
Matthew Setter at Malt Blue has recently been learning a lot about dependency injection and how it’s implemented in Zend Framework 2. He is less familiar with setter injection but has been learning how to do it, through ServiceManager-aware interfaces, and will share how it’s done in this post.

Migrating Legacy Data to WordPress
With an increasing number of users migrating to WordPress, moving data from an existing CMS to WordPress has become an essential process in the transition. Although migrating small databases from another CMS can be done in a few hours, large databases can take days or even weeks. This article discusses some of the points and recommends tools to consider when migrating existing databases to WordPress.

Implementing Secure Passwords in PHP 5.5
PHP has always had a few simple ways to implement password hashing to an extent. MD5 and SHA1 are examples of this, but the security of these methods is not what it should be. Many developers use MD5 and SHA1 without even adding a SALT, which is a string that helps to add complexity to the application. Some developers use something as awful as base 64 encoding and decoding simply because they can be easily manipulated. But these things are not secure folks, and the clever people who want to hack your site or steal your money can see right through them. Lucky for us, the folks at PHP have thought about this long and hard, and the result is a very simple PHP password hashing API that is not only easy to use, but fast and secure.

Design Patterns in PHP: Singletons
The singleton pattern is used to restrict the instantiation of a class to a single object, which can be useful when only one object is required across the system. Singletons are designed to ensure there is a single (hence the name singleton) class instance and that is global point of access for it. Along with this single instance we have global access and lazy initialisation.

Extending CodeIgniter Core Libraries to Add Your Own Functionality
CodeIgniter is a PHP framework built on the MVC design pattern. There is no doubt that it is popular as it's the most forked PHP project on Github ever, the second most watched PHP project on Github, and has a large group of followers and contributors. Why is it so well loved? The answer is that you can add your own functionality to the CodeIgniter core without even breaking a sweat. You can extend the core controllers, models and just about everything else with relative simplicity. Let's have a look at how we can do that.

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