Building a Twitter Hashtag Contest – Registering the App
Social networking sites play a vital role in increasing the popularity of a website or application. The vast majority of web sites provide the ability to share their content on popular social media sites with the click of a button. Organising a contest on these sites is another excellent way of promoting your application.The first part of this article focuses on configuring a Twitter application. 

Performance improvement for OCI_RETURN_LOBS in PHP OCI8 2.0.8

Reducing "round trips" to the database server is important for performance and ultimately for system scalability. A server round-trip is defined as the trip from PHP to the database server and back to PHP. Reducing round trips makes everything more efficient: PHP is faster, there is less network overhead, the database doesn't have to do a context switch or do any processing for you. Applications have some control over round trips, for example by effectively using pre-fetching or by using an appropriate execute mode to minimise unnecessary rollbacks at the end of a script.

Using Composer Without GitIgnoring Vendor/
Lorna Michell writes - Recent additions to the joind.in API have introduced some new dependencies so we decided we'd start using Composer to manage these - but we don't want to run composer unsupervised. I'm sure this will bring the rain of "just run composer install, it's probably mostly almost safe" criticism, but actually it's quite tricky to run Composer without excluding vendor/ from source control so I thought I'd share how we did it so that anyone who wants to do so can learn from my experience!

PHPUNIT 4.0: Test Proxies
One of the highlights of PHPUnit 4.0, which was released last week, is improved support for integration testing through so-called test proxies.

PHP 5.6 and the Splat Operator
There are a couple of new features coming in to PHP 5.6, including "variadic functions" and "argument unpacking". Both use a new operator in PHP which looks like an elipsis (three dots ...) and is referred to as either the splat operator or the scatter operator. Lorna Mitchell shares some examples here.

Symfony in Drupal 8
If you are a Drupaler, you must be aware that Drupal 8 is on the way. What you may not know is that it includes a few important Symfony components. Working with Drupal 8.x will give Drupalers an opportunity to become a part of a massive learning curve and is going to tempt them to know more about Symfony. This article discusses the Symfony components that have been added to Drupal 8, covering some third party libraries along the way.

Methods on Primitive Types in PHP
This article focuses on turning primitive types like strings or arrays into “pseudo-objects” by allowing you to perform method calls on them.

Laravel Unwrapped: Session, Auth and Cache
In recent years, Laravel has become one of the most prominent frameworks software engineers use for building their web applications. One thing though that not a lot of programmers take advantage of is Laravel's component-based system. In this tutorial, we'll be diving into a group of these components, learning how they work, how they're used by the framework, and how we can extend their functionality.

How to Check the Size of a File in PHP
PHP has a handy function called filesize() which can help us display how big a file is. It does this in bytes by default, but with a bit of tinkering we can easily convert this into kilobytes or megabytes.

Symfony2 Components Overview: Translation
This post covers the Symfony Translation component. The component provides tools to internationalise applications.

Exploring Traits
Among the new features and fixes that come with PHP5.4 is the addition of traits to the PHP language. PHP is a single inheritance language, but traits can help solve multiple inheritance issues.

We are still trying to grow our list. If you find PHP Weekly useful please tweet about us! Thanks

unsubscribe from this list | update subscription preferences