Here it is folks, the first day of the year and the first edition of PHP Weekly for 2015.
This week's edition is packed with reflective articles on achievements during 2014 - the good, the bad and the best, plus future plans for 2015.
Brandon Savage's Object-Oriented PHP Masterclass is back, kicking off on February 7th for a week. Registration is open now.
Several conferences have been announced for the coming year, including Ski PHP 2015, which this year will be held in conjunction with the OpenWest Conference, in Utah. The call for papers is now open for both.
Plus we have the audio portion of the first live recorded Laravel video podcast, featuring live questions and answers, and discussion about the release schedule for Laravel 5.
Ade and I would like to thank each and every one of you out there in the PHP community who have subscribed to our weekly newsletter, and who help us immensely with proof reading, article submissions and general advice. With over 12000 people receiving and reading PHP Weekly each we would not be where we are today without all of you. We are humbled by the kind words and also inspired when someone gives us advice.
Here's to a Happy, Healthy and Prosperous 2015 for you all and your families.
Katie and Ade |
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Articles
Sergey Aleynikov - Second trial over stolen code set for April
As programmers we thought you may be interested in knowing about Sergey Aleynikov, if you have not already heard of him. He is a programmer who worked at Goldman Sachs in the area of high frequency trading, who also contributed to the open source community. When he left the company he took code with him, much of it open source or derived from open source, and he was featured in the book Flash Boys. There are various places online to read about him, but it was interesting to me as a fellow programmer to see how serious things can become if you take code from your employer. Wherever you sit on this, it is worth reading.
Sergey has his own site, where he is also accepting donations
Top Best Countries with the Most Creative PHP Developers in 2014
The launch of the PHP and JavaScript Innovation Award World Championship this year motivated many more developers to share innovative components, not only to get recognition for themselves but also for their countries. Read this article to discover which are the best countries with the most creative developers so far, and how you can still help your country to win the Innovation Award Championship of 2014.
SitePoint PHP in 2015: Future Plans
Bruno Skvorc does an end of year recap, looking at what's been going on at SitePoint.com in 2014, and talking about where it is heading in 2015.
Five Influencers You Should Thank This Year for Making the PHP Community So Awesome
Cal Evans lists the influencers that help keep this community at the top. In his opinion, these are the people that you need to seek out and thank, because without them, the PHP community would not be what it is today.
Symfony 2014 Year in Review: symfony.com Website
2014 has been the busiest year in the entire history of the Symfony project website. In case you missed any of them, this is the top 10 list of the most popular blog posts in 2014.
75 Laravel Tutorials, Packages, and Resources from 2014
2014 is coming to a close, and to celebrate, the Laravel News team has put together this post of all the greatest hits each month. This features cool packages, resources, and tutorials that came out over the year.
Why did this year has passed so swiftly? My 2014 Retrospective.
Gonzalo Ayuso reviews the good and the bad parts of his year of 2014. |
Tutorials and Talks
PHP Denial of Service Attack Revisited
In 2011 the Chaos Computer Club revealed a major complexity attack vulnerability that works across all major languages. PHP addressed the vulnerability for forms, but never really fixed it. Nowadays every web application uses a JSON API, which is still vulnerable to complexity attacks.
Magento Install and Upgrade Data Scripts Explained
This post focuses specifically on how to write infallible Magento install and upgrade scripts.
PHP's New Hashtable Implementation
As part of the work on the upcoming PHP 7, large parts of the Zend Engine have been rewritten with a focus on smaller data structures requiring fewer allocations. This article provides an overview of the new hashtable implementation and shows why it is more efficient than the previous implementation.
Introduction to Creating Your First WordPress Widget
For non-coders creating a WordPress site, widgets are great. They let you add menus, lists, feeds, text and much much more to widget areas which don't need to be limited to the sidebar. Many themes now feature widget areas in the footer, and the big theme frameworks often have widget areas in multiple locations, such as the header, and before and after the content. This five part series takes us through the steps required to create your first widget.
Recursively Deleting Elements From an Array
Rob Allen writes - "I had a need recently to delete items from a nested associative array and also any empty sub-arrays. My initial thought was to use array_walk_recursive, but this doesn't work as you can't unset nested elements, and you only have access to the leaves. Clearly I needed a recursive function. I'm sure that this has been done many times before, but this is my solution".
Magento SEO: Optimising Pages and Avoiding Duplicate Content Penalties
In this second part of this series, we’ll explore ways to optimise our category and product pages for best search results. We'll also review some advanced techniques on how to avoid duplicate content penalties from search engines.
Writing Secure PHP Code - PHP Security Tutorial
Create secure PHP code and prevent attacks and exploits in your code - this is an essential course for all developers.
Integrate Bitcoin Payment Gateway Into OpenCart: Part 2
In the previous tutorial, we began implementing a Bitcoin payment system. Specifically, we introduced a dashboard to enable our users to administer the plugin. In this tutorial, we're going to continue working on the plugin by building the store front-end.
3 PHP Loops Gotchas
This post is to give you a few tips that you should remember when dealing with loops in PHP. You will learn why it is bad practice to initialize variables inside a loop, why a do-while can cause headaches if one doesn't understand it properly, when for loops should replace for each and some more interesting loop gotchas. |
News and Announcements
The Object-Oriented PHP Masterclass Is Back!
Brandon Savage's Object-Oriented PHP Masterclass kicks off on February 7th, and runs through February 15th. It’s designed with the live sessions on the weekend, so you can participate and then do the homework portion during the week. And the best part is, you don’t have to travel - the whole thing is done online! Registration is open now.
OpenWest Conference - May6-9th 2015, Utah
Utah Open Source Foundation, a collaboration of volunteers from local user groups, held its first conference in 2006 to support and promote open-source software. The conference has grown since then, and so has its regional reach into the surrounding communities. The Call for Papers is now open, until the end of January.
Ski PHP Conference - May 7-9th 2015, Utah
We've arranged for Ski PHP 2015 to join the OpenWest 2015 Conference. This will allow us to reduce the cost per attendee to just $50 (excluding tutorials), and provide even more value! In addition to the PHP tracks, there will be tracks for Javascript, Data, UI/UX, Security, and more. We anticipate having 3 PHP tracks over 3 days (May 7-9), with the majority of the speakers being non-local. We also hope to announce PHP tutorials soon for the day before the conference begins, May 6th.
Bulgaria Web Summit - April 18th 2015, Sofia
The Bulgaria Web Summit is an annual conference about the modern web, covering programming, UX/UI/IA/Design, IOT and web. Pre-register now. |
Use Varnish to Avoid API Rate Limits
A very basic limit we all run into, when getting a general API off the ground, often includes rate limits on our API keys with secondary data providers. Varnish is a reverse proxy cache that is typically used for presenting front end content very quickly, but it’s configuration works on url strings. It’s very simple to set it up in front of common and generic endpoints with a short TTL to allow for reuse of data from your secondary providers. Watch this video presentation here.
Drupal & PHP: Linking Islands, The Podcast – Part 1
Part 1 – Larry Garfield and I had a long chat in front of my camera at DrupalCon Amsterdam. Part of the idea was to help Larry prepare his thoughts for writing the blog post that has turned into "Building Bridges: Linking Islands" in the Future of PHP guest blog series on Acquia.com. In this part we cover Larry's start in Drupal, some project history, what Drupal can teach (and needs to learn) about contribution and community ("celebrating the newbie" and the power of "thank you"), The New PHP, fuzzy project boundaries and inter-project collaboration.
Phil and Kalen present A MageTalk Regift.
PHP Town Hall #33: CakePHP, Monga and RFCs
This episode we're joined by two top CakePHPers, Jose Diaz-Gonzalez and Bryan Crowe. Ben is AWOL, Phil is insanely jet-lagged and has no idea what he is talking about. Our awesome guests try their best to carry Phil through the show, where we discuss exciting new stuff happening with CakePHP, and what we think of a few current RFCs being discussed in PHP land. We also talk a bit about Monga, a League package which Bryan has now assumed the role of project lead.
Voices of the ElePHPant - Interview with Brian Richards
This week Cal Evans talks to creator of @WPSessions Brian Richards.
Laravel IO Podcast: Episode 19 - Live Q&A
This is the audio portion of our first live recorded video podcast. We took live questions and answers, and discussed Laravel 5 release scheduling, ORM origin story, Laravel internals, Angular/Angular 2, and more!
Three Devs and a Maybe Podcast: The Christmas Episode
It is two days before Christmas but that will not stop us from recording a new episode. This week we discuss Fraser's gambling hot-streak at Ascot, Mick's move, and how horrible Martinis are. We then move on to how Fraser is getting on in his new job up in London, and Mick's university presentation on Fuzzy Logic. This leads us on to how 'unrandom' humans are, and professional Rock-Paper-Scissors tournaments. Finally, Edd brings up some interesting talks by Greg Young (on EventStore) and Rich Hickey (on software design).
The Loosely Coupled Podcast: Episode 16 - Estimation is Hard
In this episode, Jeff and Matt talk about the difficult task all developers are continuously faced with: estimation. They cover some examples of times they have found estimation difficult, techniques that have worked for them, and even some advice on how to deal with the stress of estimating incorrectly. Ultimately, estimation is a part of the necessary communication that must happen for a project to be succesful.
That Podcast Episode 13: The One to Cap 2014
Beau and Dave wrap up 2014 discussing a bunch of stuff.
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Jobs
To post a job advert please contact [email protected]
Fuzzy Matching Project Work
We are looking for someone to help on a specific project which will involve matching products on one website with products on another website. Someone with skills and demonstrable experience of matching algorithms is a necessity. If you can’t prove that you can do this kind of work please do not contact us. For the right person there is ongoing exciting work. In the first instance please contact us at [email protected] with “Fuzzy matching project” as the subject and we will then create a shortlist, providing the shortlist with information about our company.
Toptal PHP Developer
Freelance with Companies like Airbnb, IDEO & JPMorgan. Work on special projects with great companies through Toptal. Set your weekly/hourly rate, and work from anywhere in the world as an elite PHP developer. See if you have what it takes!
Programmer Extraordinaire, Expensify - California
We are Expensify and we do "expense reports that don't suck!". Imagine a world where expense reports are created and paid automatically. That's our vision, and we need your help to make it a reality. You will be working with a highly skilled team, interesting data, and modern tools to solve hard and interesting problems at scale. We are remote friendly. |
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
php-skeleton-app
An MVC-based PHP skeleton application tailored for rapid development.
grav
A new PHP open source flat-file CMS.
colors.php
An easy way to add colors in your CLI scripts.
xeta
A resource to help people starting with Cake3.
framework
Minute PHP Framework.
browsershot
Convert a webpage to an image.
mojio
A Guzzle client to connect to our API.
seat
Simple (or Stupid) EVE Online API Tool.
oneapi-php
Infobip OneAPI library for PHP.
puppy
A tiny, brave and faithful MVC framework.
facebook-bot
Facebook bot written in PHP.
phalex
Library built on top of PhalconPHP Framework.
mermaid-php
PHP adapter for the Mermaid project by @knsv.
stop-words
Filter your text with common stop words.
sliver
A tiny PHP test framework.
base
Multilingual CMS build with Laravel 4.2.
plop
A simple logging library for PHP.
eris
A porting of Quickcheck and property-based testing tools to the PHP and PHPUnit ecosystem. |
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