Welcome back PHP fans, it's that time of the week again.
Finding an appropriate PHP tool takes time and effort, so this week we bring you 40+ Tools for Better Writing PHP, to give you a head start.
The SitePoint team introduce us to their most recent crop of authors this year, both new and regular.
Also this week, Derick Rethans continues his series on Xdebug 2.3, with the fifth episode focusing on additions to the trace file functionality.
The Programming With Yii2 series continues, with this latest tutorial looking at Yii's built-in I18n internationalisation support.
Plus a new conference has been announced this week. PHP Conference Asia takes place in Singapore on September 24-25th, so save the date and wait for news of the Call for Papers next month.
And finally, the Full Stack Radio Podcast team talk to Phil Sturgeon about designing and testing APIs at Ride, amongst other things.
Have a fantastic weekend!
Cheers
Katie and Ade |
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Articles
7 Ways to Optimise Jenkins
Jenkins is a great tool for continuous integration and continuous delivery. In previous articles we’ve learned how to set up Jenkins for quality assurance, and looked at one particularly useful plugin for supercharging your processes. In this article, we’ll guide you through seven ways to make sure you use Jenkins efficiently.
40+ Tools for Writing Better PHP
PHP is a server-side scripting language designed for web development, but also used as a general-purpose programming language. There are scads of PHP tools available over the internet for PHP developers, but finding an appropriate PHP tool is quite an arduous task and demands effort and time. Today we’ve collected 45 handy PHP development tools for developers…
Improvements to WordPress.org
If you visit WordPress.org regularly you might have noticed some changes around the place. If you don’t, now’s the time to check them out! We’ve been working hard to improve the site to make it more useful to everyone, both developers and users, and we hope you like what we’ve done.
Welcoming New Authors: January - March 2015
Every three months the SitePoint team introduce us to their new authors. This time around they also mention their newest regular authors too. |
Tutorials and Talks
Create a Simple CRM in WordPress: Adding Columns to WP_List_Table
We’ve been looking at how to create a simple CRM system in WordPress. In the last part of this series, we used Advanced Custom Fields to add custom fields to our Contacts custom post type. We learned how to use Advanced Custom Fields and configure it to work programmatically. Today, we’ll cover how to display the data stored in our custom fields right within our contacts table.
Laravel Blade Recursive Partials with @each
In this tutorial, we’ll go through the process of implementing recursive partials in Laravel’s Blade templating engine by means of the @each command. This will allow us to render data structures with an arbitrary number of nested children without needing to know the maximum depth of the array.
Xdebug 2.3: Improvements to Tracing
This is the fifth article in a series about new features in Xdebug 2.3, which was first released on February 22nd. In this instalment we are going to have a look at the additions to the trace file functionality. Trace files are a way to document every function call, and if you enable it, variable assignment and function's return values - including when these functions were called, and how much memory PHP was using at the moment of function entry (and exit).
How PHP 7 Can Help You Write Better Tests
With the introduction of strict type hinting, PHP 7 will be creating more robust tests to help us develop better quality code. Read this article to learn how you can write more robust tests in practice with the help of strict type hinting.
PHPUnit 4.6 and Global State
PHPUnit 4.6, which was released last week, introduces an optional check that marks a test as risky when global variables, super-global variables, or static attributes in user-defined classes are modified during its execution.
A Complete Guide on WordPress FileSystem Permissions and Ownerships
This post discusses WordPress file system permissions and ownerships, their importance, and how they can be set correctly to ensure the smooth functioning of your website.
Install and Integrate Elasticsearch with Drupal
In this tutorial I am going to look at the possibility of using Drupal 7 as a content management system that powers another high performance application. To illustrate the latter, I will use the Silex PHP microframework and Elasticsearch as the data source. The goal is to create a proof of concept, demonstrating using these three technologies together.
Programming With Yii2: Localisation With I18n
This is the 5th part in this Programming With Yii2 series, guiding readers in use of the newly upgraded Yii2 Framework for PHP. This tutorial shows you how to make use of Yii's built-in I18n internationalisation support to make your application ready for translation into a number of languages.
Creating a PHP Extension in Rust
It has been said that one of the barriers to successfully writing an extension is they’re generally written in C, and it’s hard to gain confidence in C code if you’re not an expert at the language. Jared McFarland has toyed with the idea of writing one in Rust, and finally got it to work this week.
PHP CRUD Tutorial
Creating CRUD grid is a very common task in web development (CRUD stands for Create/Read/Update/Delete). They maybe exist in a content management system, an inventory management system, or accounting software. In this three part tutorial series, we will go through the steps of creating a PHP CRUD grid. We want to demonstrate how PHP, as a server side language, communicates with backend MySQL, and meanwhile renders front-end HTML.
How to Build a WordPress Image Slider
This tutorial is about building a WordPress image slider from the ground up without using a plugin. Actually this is not totally true, because the tutorial is “only” about the WordPress part and we will be using a readymade slideshow plugin written in jQuery.
What to Expect When You're Expecting: PHP 7, Part 1
With the RFC for the PHP 7.0 Timeline passing almost unanimously (32 to 2), we have now entered into feature freeze, and we’ll see the first release candidate (RC) appearing in mid June. But what does this mean for you? We have seen a huge reluctance of web hosts to move towards newer versions of 5.x. Won’t a major version bring huge backwards compatibility breaks and make that move even slower? The answer to that is: it depends. So keep reading. |
News and Announcements
WordPress 4.2 Beta 4
WordPress 4.2 Beta 4 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.
Drupal 7.36 Released
Drupal 7.36, a maintenance release with numerous bug fixes (no security fixes) and several new features, is now available for download
Northeast PHP Conference - August 22nd-23rd 2015, Boston
The Northeast PHP Conference is a community conference intended for networking and collaboration in the developer community. Two days of talks ranging from starting work in the industry to expanding your skill set as an experienced user, there are sessions for everyone! The Call for Papers is now open.
PHP Conference Asia - September 24-25th 2015, Singapore
A new conference has been announced this month, the PHP Conference Asia. The Call for Papers opens in May so watch this space!
Joomla! and Glip Enter Collaboration Partnership
Joomla!, one of the world’s most popular open source content management systems (CMS), is proud to announce its partnership with Glip - the business messaging app with built-in productivity tools. The partnership will enable Joomla! to streamline communication among its many teams and volunteers, while providing a unified approach to tracking tasks, files and events. |
Podcasts
Laravel IO Podcast: Episode 24 - Dog At The Keyboard
In this episode the crew discusses PHP 7, Browserify, and their favourite Mac applications.
dev/hell Podcast Episode 58 - I Have a Mouth Problem
So we kinda forgot we recorded this until a month after the fact. Whoops! This ep is all about side projects, kicking off with Chris and Ed talking about CBTTool, Ed’s electronic worksheet for folks with anxiety disorders. Then we discuss Chris’ new book The Grumpy Little Book of Hack, and Ed’s experience technical editing Modern PHP by Josh Lockhart. Then we get into a boring discussion about marketing. Plus we have STICKERS!
Voices of the ElePHPant - Interview with Michelangelo Van Dam
This week Cal Evans interviews DragonBe blogger Michelangelo Van Dam.
MageTalk Magento Podcast #29 - “He’ll Pluralise the Socks Off of You”
The guys dissect the cruel oligarchy that the new Magento Forums have created with its kudo-based system.
Full Stack Radio Podcast Episode 13: Phil Sturgeon - Designing and Testing APIs, Go and PHP 7
In this episode, Adam talks to Philip J. Sturgeon about designing and testing APIs at Ride. They also talk about building microservices with Go, and some of the new features coming in PHP 7.
Acquia Podcast - From Content Strategy to Drupal Site Building: Connecting The Dots with Ronald Ashri
Ronald Ashri, former CTO at BlueSpark is now a Founder at Roomify - a Drupal-centric startup focusing on online reservations. Here, Ronald presents an enjoyable and valuable session about content strategy and Drupal, full of practical and actionable advice – worth watching in full for all strategists, site builders, and anyone who wants to know how to build a better content-oriented site. |
New eBooks Available for Subscribers in April
Do you want to learn more about MongoDB? How about mastering Node.js design patterns? Our latest batch of eBooks will teach you all you need to know about these topics and more.
A Peek of the PHP Ecosystem Today
This week Cory is joined by Pierre Joye, from the Open Source Technology Center at Microsoft, to talk about the current state of the PHP Ecosystem. There are many different projects in PHP which are making news, Pierre explains what they are and how they are changing the shape of the PHP Ecosystem. Watch the video presentation here.
Iterating PHP Iterators - An ebook by Cal Evans
Learn to use the power tools built into the PHP language to write better and faster code.
Convert a Laravel Application from 4 to 5
Changing major versions of a framework can be a daunting task, and the Laravel 4 to Laravel 5 upgrade path has had a lot of people talking lately. We’ll take an open-source Laravel 4 project and walk through the steps to convert a Laravel application from 4 to 5. Listen to and watch the slides of Matt Stauffer's presentation.
FuelPHP Application Development Blueprints (by Sébastien Drouyer, published 27th February 2015)
FuelPHP is an open source framework that uses some of the most advanced features of PHP to allow you to build projects as easily and quickly as possible. It is gaining popularity with developers as you can build powerful, complex, and yet efficient applications with very little code. This book will provide you with the skills you need to successfully create, improve, and publish functional and maintainable FuelPHP applications. |
Jobs
To post a job advert please contact [email protected]
Software Engineer 3 - Ebay Inc. Austin, Texas
The Extensibility Team at Magento is looking for a Senior PHP/LAMP Developer with industry experience to help us make this, and future releases of Magento, gain even more market share. This is an exciting time to join Magento and work on a product that the community is eagerly awaiting. If you are an experienced software engineer, and willing to push the boundaries of your knowledge and drive your career forward, we want to hear from you soon and Magento will reward you well for your talents. |
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
hook
A RESTful and extendable Backend as a Service that provides instant backend to develop sites and apps faster, with dead-simple integration for JavaScript, iOS, Android and more.
distill
Distill is a PHP framework of extremely limited scope. It's general philosophy is to let PHP itself be the underlying base abstraction, while providing just enough functionality to provide for building well architected applications and allow for a module based ecosystem.
indicolo-php
A simple PHP Wrapper for the Indico API.
geo
A collection of classes to work with GIS geometries.
shortcode
Shortcode is a framework and library agnostic engine for PHP, interpreting and replacing "shortcodes" (small script-like text fragments) using dynamic callbacks.
prado
A component-based and event-driven programming framework for developing Web applications in PHP 5.
twitch-api
PHP library for working with the Twitch API.
php-mongo
PHP ODM for MongoDB.
drone
Rapid Development Framework for PHP 5.5.0+.
streams
PHP wrapper for multi curl.
restlt
RestLt is a flexible small library that will allow you to build RESTfull service.
bolt
Bolt is a tool for Content Management, which strives to be as simple and straightforward as possible.
collection-type
CollectionType is a library that provides Collection and Map with their subtypes which are checking types of data set for PHP.
simpleimage
A PHP class that simplifies working with images.
faker
Faker is a PHP library that generates fake data for you. |
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