Hi PHP fans, and thanks for joining us this week.
Last month the SitePoint.com team started their annual framework popularity survey. With nearly 8000 entries, the results and prize-winners are now in.
The fourth part of the Programming With Yii2 series has been posted, focusing on integrating a popular user registration plugin.
Also this week, we have new releases from WordPress, Joomla! and CakePHP, all available immediately.
Plus, the Bulgaria Web Summit takes place later this month, and there are still a few tickets available.
Finally, the Three Devs and a Maybe Podcast team are back after a few weeks hiatus, filling us in on what they have been up to since we last heard from them.
Have a great weekend,
Cheers
Katie and Ade |
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Articles
Best PHP Framework for 2015 – SitePoint Survey Results
One month ago, we started the annual SitePoint framework popularity survey. Now that the month has expired, it’s time to look at the results and to distribute the prizes. The response was a whopping 7800 entries, far more than any other survey we’ve held so far, and even after filtering out invalid entries we end up with a formidable number of valid participants.
Five Things You Must Know About PHP7
The PHP 7 Timeline RFC was approved in a near unanimous vote, and aims to release PHP 7 in October 2015. Find out the most important things you need to know.
Top 10 Z-Ray Features to Check Out
This article introduces the top 10 features of Z-Ray - an innovative new technology from Zend, that makes PHP development a whole lot quicker and easier by giving developers unprecedented insight into their code - and the visibility they need to develop top-notch apps.
5 Tools to Visualise Database Schemas
Database schema visualisation is an essential process during the initial project design phase. Also, it can be useful when you need to reverse engineer a big schema and need to understand the various relationships between different tables. Below are given various database diagramming and visualisation tools that will help you make sense of your complex database designs. |
Tutorials and Talks
Programming With Yii2: Integrating User Registration
This is part four of a series on Yii2. In Programming With Yii2: Getting Started, we set up Yii2 locally, built a Hello World application, set up a remote server and used Github to deploy our code. In part two, we learned about Yii's implementation of its Model View Controller architecture and how to build web pages and forms that collect and validate data. In part three, we learned about working with databases and ActiveRecord. In this tutorial, we'll walk you through integrating a popular user registration plugin.
Creating a PHP Daemon Service
Daemons are special applications that can monitor and process an important activity on a machine in the background. Read this article to learn how to create a daemon in pure PHP, handle signals, handle multiple asynchronous I/O and events with libevent, monitor daemon performance, start the daemon and distribute your daemon application as a PHAR archive.
Counting Facebook Likes and Twitter Tweets in Your App
Although the number of shares and tweets can be shown on a page using widgets, sometimes you may want to use that information programmatically in your application. That will be explained in this article. You will learn how to fetch the data from Facebook and Twitter, how to optimise the connection to these web sites and how to automatically update the data.
Create a Simple CRM in WordPress: Advanced Custom Fields
We've been looking at how to create a simple CRM system in WordPress. In the last part of this series, we added a custom email address field to our Contacts custom post type. We learned how to write and read this custom field data, and implement a nonce to ensure our form submissions are secure. Today, we'll cover how to use Advanced Custom Fields, a popular WordPress Plugin, to quickly generate custom fields.
Xdebug 2.3: Improvements to Debugging
This is the fourth article in a series about new features in Xdebug 2.3, which was first released on February 22nd. In this article we are looking at the improvements towards "remote" debugging.
The Definitive Guide to WordPress Maintenance
WordPress maintenance is often seen as a chore, but it’s extremely important. Most web platforms, without a little extra care, can become slow, error prone and unreliable. From a security perspective, a poorly maintained site can even become a liability. For most of this article, we’re assuming you have Administrator access to your WordPress site, at the very least.
How To Set Up a Two Node LEPP Stack on CentOS 7
In this tutorial, we will create a simple web application in a two-tier architecture. Our base operating system for both nodes will be CentOS 7. The site will be powered by an Nginx web server running PHP code that talks to a PostgreSQL database.
Doctrine Not Saving ManyToMany
Say you have a ManyToMany relationship, like Post <—> Tag. When you add tags to a Post and then save the Post, everything is great. But when you add posts to a Tag and then save the Tag, the posts are not saved. Why? Because Doctrine persists changes only on the owning side of a relation. The owning side is the one that has the inversedBy. How to fix this? Simple. If you’re accessing the Entity directly (without a Symfony form), then there is only 1 step.
S.O.L.I.D: The First 5 Principles of Object Oriented Design
S.O.L.I.D is an acronym for the first five object-oriented design (OOD) principles by Robert C. Martin. These principles, when combined together, make it easy for a programmer to develop software that is easy to maintain and extend. They also make it easy for developers to avoid code smells, easily refactor code, and are also a part of the agile or adaptive software development.
Build a Time Tracker with Laravel 5 and AngularJS - Part 1
Laravel and AngularJS work great together, but it can be a little tricky to get going at first, especially if you are new to the frameworks. In a previous article, Chris showed you how to make a Single Page Comment App with Laravel and Angular. This tutorial will again bring the two frameworks together as we build out a simple time tracking application. |
News and Announcements
WordPress 4.2 Beta 3
WordPress 4.2 Beta 3 is now available! This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site just to play with the new version.
Joomla! 3.4.1 Released
The Joomla! Project and the Production Leadership Team are proud to announce the release of Joomla! 3.4.1. This is a maintenance release for the 3.x series of Joomla! and addresses issues introduced in 3.4.0 with installing certain extensions and content languages access.
CakePHP 3.0.0 is Here!
The CakePHP core team is thrilled to announce the release of CakePHP 3.0.0. This is the first API stable release for the 3.0 branch. This release is a backwards incompatible release with previous CakePHP versions.
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. Last few tickets are available now.
DrupalCon - May 11-15th 2015, Los Angeles
DrupalCon brings together thousands of people from across the globe who use, develop, design, and support the Drupal platform. The North American DrupalCon is the most widely attended Drupal event in the world. Taking place in sunny Los Angeles this year, DrupalCon will feature a full schedule of educational, networking and contribution opportunities. Tickets are available now.
php[tek] Conference - May 18-25th 2015, Chicago
php[tek] is a PHP conference like no other. It brings together great technology content and great people, and mixes them up in a wonderful cocktail of PHP fun. You will find high-quality presentations by the brightest experts in the PHP world, coupled with a welcoming and friendly community of attendees and speakers. Early bird tickets are available now.
PHPLicengine v2.0.3
PHPLicengine has launched their latest version. This licensing software works with some well-known encoders and helps you to provide licenses (both locally and remotely) to your own clients when selling your scripts |
Podcasts
Three Devs and a Maybe Podcast: Guess Who's Back? Again...
We're back folks. It's been a few weeks since we last recorded and thanks to you all that enquired as to 'where we were?' Lew, Mike and Edd got together this week for a long overdue catch up. Turns out, we've all been up to quite a lot. Mike is winding down towards the end of his University course, Lew has been a learning machine during quieter times at work, and Edd has been extremely busy with mainly Swift projects. We chat about the various things we have been doing and things ahead. Lew then discusses his move over to using the Laravel framework and his reasons for moving away from his own framework. Mike discusses his experiences at the PHP Conference, and Edd then finishes by discussing his dabbles with ES6. Anyway, enough spoilers... give it a listen ;-)
That Podcast Episode 16: The One With HTTP/2
Beau and Dave catch up on their latest happenings and talk about HTTP/2, what makes it different and how we understand it could change the way we do things.
Voices of the ElePHPant - Interview with David Stockton
This week Cal Evans talks to Front Range PHP User Group member David Stockton.
Full Stack Radio Podcast - Episode 12: Jack McDade - Building Photoshoot.io and Getting Stuff Done
In this episode, Adam talks to Jack McDade, creator of Statamic, about building his latest project Photoshoot.io. They also talk about how Jack juggles design and development, and how to buckle down and get things done.
MageTalk Magento Podcast #28
“One Man’s Beautymark is Another Man’s Disgusting Hideous Blob”. The guys talk about current events, PCI compliance, and a Throwback Thursday to Magento 1.6.
The Five-Minute Geek Show Podcast: Episode 26 - It's All About That Schema
Talking about the MEAN stack and why Mongo & NoSQL make you work too hard.
Acquia Podcast: 2014 Greatest Hits - 30 Awesome Drupal 8 API Functions you Should Already Know - Fredric Mitchell
Looking back on 2014, it was a great year of events and conversations with people in and around Acquia, open source, government and business. I think I could happily repost at least 75% of the podcasts I published in 2014 as "greatest hits," but then we'd never get on to all the cool stuff I have been up to so far in 2015! Nonetheless, here's one of my favourite recordings from 2014: a terrific session that will help you wrap your head around developing for Drupal 8, and a great conversation with Frederic Mitchell that covered the use of Drupal and open source in government, government decision-making versus corporate decision-making, designing Drupal 7 sites with Drupal 8 in mind, designing sites for the end users and where the maximum business value comes from in your organisation, and more! |
Laracasts - Intuitive Integration Testing
The reality is that, sometimes, you don't require a big testing framework to help orchestrate conversations with the business, design your objects, and more. Sometimes, you just want to ensure that the dang thing works like you expect, with as little configuration as possible! In these situations, the Laracasts Integrated Package is exactly what you need.
PHP: Under The Hood
View the slides of Davey Shafik's presentation at ConFoo 2015.
WordPress 4 Business Website Redesign: With Custom Coding of Imported Database (by Stephen Link, published 26 Feb 2015)
This book covers the basics from domain name registration and web site hosting - selecting a host and registrar, selecting a plan, and price comparison. We will then go into installation of WordPress using your host's Control Panel or the WordPress copy/install instructions. You will see four free themes installed and illustrated before moving forward with the "spacious" theme.
Creating Mobile Apps with jQuery Mobile (by Andy Matthews, published 27 Feb 2015)
This book assumes a basic level of experience with standard web development. If you've used jQuery Mobile before, you're good to go. Otherwise, you can pick it up along the way. |
Jobs
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Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
future-process
Future Process is object-oriented proc_open with an asynchronous API and automatic queueing of commands.
rocketship
RocketShip is a web framework that makes developing web sites and web applications in record time.
task-daemon
Simple PHP fork()ing daemon which runs tasks in the background. It uses Gearman internally, but it is not exposed to the user.
testdummy
TestDummy makes the process of preparing factories (dummy data) for your integration tests as easy as possible.
mongo-object
Mongo-object is a set of classes that simplify storage of PHP objects in MongoDB.
yasumi
Yasumi is an easy PHP Library for calculating national holidays.
cerberus
Cerberus is an IRC bot written for PHP.
modler
Modler is a set of scripts that provide some of the most basic model and collection handling pieces of functionality.
lingua
Lingua is an open-source internationalisation toolkit for PHP.
metaphore
PHP cache slam defense using a semaphore to prevent dogpile effect (aka clobbering updates, stampending herd or Slashdot effect).
gapl
Graph API PHP Library is a simple library to access graph api easily.
thumbnailr
Thumbnailr is a PHP library for dynamically generating image thumbnails in either PNG or JPEG format.
humbug
Humbug is a Mutation Testing framework for PHP to measure the real effectiveness of your test suites and assist in their improvement. It eats Code Coverage for breakfast.
traq
Traq is a PHP powered project manager and issue tracker featuring multiple projects, milestones, custom fields, per-project permissions, email notifications and much more.
laravel_blog
Blog created with the Laravel PHP framework.
scalar-objects
Scalar objects supports PHP's boolean, float, int, and string. It also support's Hack's Map, Set, and Vector.
phinster
Self-contained build system in PHP. |
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