Welcome PHP Fans!
Over 10 million websites are built on PHP, making it one of the most popular development tools out there. This has lead to the evolution of PHP frameworks. Learn all about one of the most popular - CakePHP.
Also this week, PHP 7.0.0 RC 3 has been released, and is available immediately.
The first Bulgaria PHP conference is just days away, with high quality talks from speakers such as Sebastian Bergmann and Larry Garfield. The last few tickets are available now.
Plus we have Part 2 of the New Type of PHP article, this week looking at Scalar Types.
And finally, the dev/hell podcast team is joined by Derick Bailey for a discussion on developer entrepreneurship.
Have a great weekend,
Cheers
Katie and Ade |
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Articles
What Makes CakePHP So Popular Among Developers?
With over 10 million websites already built on PHP, it is one of the most popular web development tools, and looks for nothing less than grabbing the best deal for you with the latest web offerings. However, just like every good language has its pros and cons, PHP too has its limitations as a coding instrument. This has lead to the evolution of PHP frameworks, including CakePHP.
On 10 Years at Zend
Matthew Weier O'Phinney talks us through his ten year tenure with Zend, from his first day at work to the mixture of bosses and colleagues he has worked with.
Why Can’t I Get Work at Upwork But Others Can?
It boils down to how freelance sites work. They are designed to surface the best freelancers on their platforms. That doesn’t meant you’re not good if you’re struggling to get any traction. It means if you’re new to Upwork you’re at a big disadvantage. But, it’s also not hopeless. With the strategy I’m about to show you, you can quickly gain momentum and rise to the top where getting work is a whole lot easier.
Marketplace Updates to Highlight Contributing Organisations
We are excited to announce some big changes to the Drupal.org Marketplace. In Dries’ Amsterdam Keynote, he made a compelling case for showing the contributions of organisations that are helping build Drupal. By highlighting organisations that give their employees time to give back, we make it possible for more people to give time to making the project better. Learn more here. |
Tutorials and Talks
Introducing Laravel Spark: A Deep Dive
If you've been around on the general Laravel-interested Internet over the last month or two, or if you attended Laracon US or Laracon EU, you've probably already heard of Laravel Spark. It's released as an Alpha now, so the API has solidified some... but it'll still change quite a bit between now and the release.
Calculating Periodical Events in PHP Part 2: Solving a Real World Problem
The first part of this article covered the problem of computing the dates of periodical events and nuances that can make the solution more complicated. Read this article to learn how to use the PHP Sweepstakes package to solve a real world example of the problem.
Custom Post Pagination in WordPress
If you’re dealing with lots of custom posts in WordPress, and if you’re a theme developer, this is probably a well known issue to you. Lots of people are talking about this pagination thing in different forums. However, it’s really not that tough to paginate custom posts. Let’s find out how we can do it easily.
Converting Dates Between Time Zones in PHP
Every developer has to deal with it at some point in their career. It is always there. It is persistent, relentlessly ticking away and eating productivity. It keeps track of when things happen, and can cause you pain when trying to work with it. What is it? Time (and time zones in particular).
A New Type of PHP, Part 2: Scalar Types
In our last installment, we talked about the benefits of more robust variable typing in PHP 7, and specifically the new support for typed return values. That is already a big boon to the maintainability of our code, but PHP 7 goes a step further.
The Beginners Guide to WooCommerce: Adding a Variable Product
In the previous article we added an External/Affiliate type product. Let's talk about adding the fourth type, i.e. variable product. If you categorise any product as variable it means that this single product will have many variations, which may be in terms of colour, price, stock status, etc. This explains the complexity of this product type, as each variation of a single product may have different values for colour, SKU, price, stock status, shipping, etc. In today's article I will teach you how to create a Variable product in WooCommerce.
First Look at Yahoo’s MySQL Performance Analyzer
When you deploy an app to production servers, you may experience some database problems as your data grows. Some tools can help you debug and solve your problems, like MysqlTuner, Percona, etc. In this article, we’re going to explore the Yahoo MySql performance analyser and see what the main features are.
Building Secure Web Applications in PHP
Whether you're planning the development of a brand new application or trying to prevent legacy code from causing a costly data breach, if you're going to be writing PHP where should you begin? That is the question we will attempt to answer, in detail.
How To Protect A PHP Website From SQL Injection Attacks
SQL Injection is a common problem that arises due to loopholes in the backend programming. There are many methods that can be used to avoid SQL injections in a PHP website. In this article, we will be discussing one of the scenarios and its remedy for protecting your PHP website.
Building One HTTP Client in PostgreSQL with PL/Python
PostgreSQL has a datatype for json. It’s really cool and it allows us to connect our HTTP server and our SQL database using the same datatype. Don’t ask me why, but I need to call to a HTTP server (one Silex application) from a PostgreSQL database.
Improving Your PHP Code Performance Part 2: Tuning with Pre-emptive Caching
One way to improve the performance of slow scripts is to use caching techniques to minimise the time to retrieve data that takes a long time to compute. Read this article to learn how to apply the Pre-emptive Cache class in practice to optimise the performance of scripts that retrieve data from databases.
Introducing PHP 7 Express
The PHP 7 revolution is well upon us and at the end of the year we should be seeing an official release. To help you prepare for the expected changes, the upcoming version of Zend Studio – Zend Studio 13, includes a new migration tool called PHP 7 Express. PHP 7 Express scans your PHP code for potential compatibility issues with PHP 7 and supplies you with all the information you need to get your projects ready for migration to PHP 7.
Using Codeception for Symfony Projects
Codeception Testing Framework from its roots was a plugin of symfony 1 framework. Today Codeception is powered by Symfony components and can be used to run functional tests for practically any popular PHP framework. Today we will write how Codeception can be installed into a Symfony project and fit with its structure: we will put functional and unit tests to corresponding bundles, write acceptance tests for complete application, and use one runner to execute them all at once. |
News and Announcements
PHP 7.0.0 RC 3 Released
The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.0.0 RC 3. This is the eighth pre-release of the new PHP 7 major series. All users of PHP are encouraged to test this version carefully, and report any bugs and incompatibilities in the bug tracking system.
WebCamp Zagreb - October 3rd-4th 2015
WebCamp Zagreb is a technology oriented conference for developers & designers, in its 4th year. With over 30 talks, 6 of them voted for by the community, tickets are still available.
SymfonyCon - December 1-5th 2015, Paris
SensioLabs is proud to organise the third edition of SymfonyCon, the international Symfony conference. This year, to celebrate Symfony’s 10th birthday, the conference takes place in Paris, Symfony’s hometown! Two days of workshops, followed by the two day conference, finishing with a hackday. Tickets are available now.
True North PHP - November 5-7th 2015, Toronto
True North PHP is a conference designed to showcase Toronto's talent and give back to the community that has given so much. Early Bird tickets are on sale now.
Madison PHP - November 14th 2015, Wisconsin
Join us on Saturday, November 14th, 2015 for a one day, three track conference in Madison, Wisconsin that focuses on PHP and related web technologies. This event is organised by Madison PHP and is designed to offer something to attendees at all skill levels. Tickets are on sale now.
Forum PHP - November 23rd-24th 2015, Paris
This annual conference gathers all PHP and Open Source communities, pros and PHP lovers. With 2 days, 3 tracks and all the best developers involved in PHP 7, tickets are on sale now.
Bulgaria PHP Conference - 25-27th September 2015, Sofia
This event is the initiative of a small group of developers who started the first PHP User Group in Sofia, Bulgaria just two years ago. Our desire to learn and our love for the code gave us the courage to take the initiative and bring some of the best minds in the PHP community to our home town. We have invited some top-notch speakers from all over the world who will make sure you will enjoy some high-quality talks. But most of all, we hope to get together some great people who will spend their weekend sharing their know-how and getting to know the large PHP community. Last minute tickets are available now. |
Podcasts
PHP and JavaScript Innovation Award Report September 2015 Edition - June 2015 Nominees
This is the September edition of the Innovation Award podcast hangout recorded by Manuel Lemos and Arturs Sosins, to comment on the outstanding features of all the past month nominees' and winners' PHP and JavaScript packages, and the prizes that the authors earned, starting with the nominees from the month of June 2015.
dev/hell Podcast Episode 65 - Entrepremurder
Episode 65: slow roasted for sweet mesquite flavour! Derick Bailey of WatchMeCode fame joins us for an awesome discussion of the trials and tribulations of developer entrepreneurship. Derick talks about why Signal Leaf is going away, and we swap terrifying PayPal stories.
Voices of the ElePHPant - Interview with David Hayes
This week Cal Evans interviews PHP community member, and co-owner of WordPress tutorial site WPShout, David Hayes.
Three Devs and a Maybe Podcast - PHP 7 Extension Development with Joe Watkins
In this episode we are lucky to be joined by good friend of the show Joe Watkins. We start off the podcast discussing the recent major release of pthreads (version 3) and the differences found compared to version 2. This moves us on to touch upon the design decisions made due to changes between PHP 5 and 7, providing a good API to the user, volatility and immutability considerations and installing extensions within PHP 7. We finally bring up the progress being made in moving over other extensions such as APCu and uopz, helping out with other projects such as Xdebug, and our delve into screencasting.
Laravel IO Podcast: Episode 35 - Laravel Love Affairs
In this episode, the crew discusses Laracon 2016, new framework features, preferred messaging applications, and Jack McDade possibly cheating on Taylor with Jeffrey.
Acquia Podcast - Drupal 8 Configuration Management: We Wrote the Book!
The first Drupal 8 book on the market was Drupal 8 Configuration Management, by Anja Schirwinski and Stefan Borchert from undpaul in Hannover Germany. Anja is Co-Founder and CEO of undpaul. I ran into her and undpaul's other Co-Founder/CEO, Johannes Haseitl in early May at the re:publica 2015 in Berlin, where I gave a presentation on open source and the economy. This podcast audio and video contains excerpts of the conversation we had in a corner of the very busy event location - apologies in advance for the audio challenges.
MageTalk Magento Podcast #60 - Higher Astral Planes [Live at Magento HQ]
Magento Team Members Sherrie, Piotr and Tanya join the guys for a roundtable live at Magento HQ. |
Working with Git
In this screencast we take you through using the version control system Git on a day-to-day basis. Starting off with committing a couple of files to a fresh repository, we delve into how these are internally stored and learn how to push them to an external remote. We then move on to working through a pull-request based scenario, handling branching and merge conflicts on the way. Finally, we collaborate with another user who checks-out our work and then makes a couple of changes of their own.
Set DIV Height to 100% of Its Parent Using jQuery
In this jQuery tutorial, you’ll learn how to set the height of a DIV to 100% of its parent. You’ll learn how to set variables and target selectors, how to get and set div height using height() and how to target multiple selectors at once.
Video: Symfony and Content Management
Content Management may appear simple to a layman, but when you end up working with multiple sites, multilingual, versioning, media assets and real user needs... it is not trivial. Symfony has been adopted by many popular CMSes. That's great news for all LAMP CMS devs! This talk presents some Symfony components and other tools that you can use across different Content Management Systems that use Symfony in different ways. It was presented at the Symfony Helsinki Meetup on September 17th, 2015.
Ansible Playbook Essentials Paperback (by Gourav Shah, published 5 Aug 2015)
Design automation blueprints using Ansible's playbooks to orchestrate and manage your multitier infrastructure.
Redis Essentials Paperback (by Maxwell Dayvson Da Silva & Hugo Lopes Tavares, published 8 Sep 2015)
A fast-paced guide, full of real-world examples to help you get the best out of the features offered by Redis. Harness the power of Redis to integrate and manage your projects efficiently. |
Jobs
PHP Developers at X-Team (Remote)
We're looking for developers with extensive knowledge of PHP. The perfect candidate would be highly skilled in different frameworks and libraries. We are 100% remote and we provide the funding needed to help you achieve your goals and grow as a remote developer.
Do you have a position that you would like to fill? PHP Weekly is ideal for targeting developers and the cost is only $50/week for an advert. Please let me know if you are interested by emailing me at [email protected] |
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
react-php-v8js
PHP library that renders React components on the server.
pharext
Distribute your PHP extension as self-installing phar executable.
sylius
Sylius is an open source e-commerce solution for PHP, based on the Symfony2 framework.
elefant
Elefant is a refreshingly simple PHP content management system and web framework.
serendipity
Serendipity is a PHP-powered weblog application which gives the user an easy way to maintain an online diary, weblog or even a complete homepage.
core
The XP framework is an all-purpose, object oriented PHP framework.
whoops
Whoops is an error handler base/framework for PHP.
array-filter
An improved version of PHP's standard array_filter.
elgg
A social networking engine in PHP/MySQL.
rock-db
Object Relational Mapping (ORM) for PHP.
classyfile
Provides a way to break PHP files containing multiple classes and creates single files per class.
bart
A collection of our critical PHP tools.
dcrypt
A petite library of encryption functionality for PHP.
eris
Eris is a porting of QuickCheck and property-based testing tools to the PHP and PHPUnit ecosystem.
snipe-it
A free open source IT asset/license management system built in PHP on Laravel 4.2 and Bootstrap 3.
jolinotif
JoliNotif is a PHP library to send notifications to your desktop directly from your script.
styleci
The PHP coding style continuous integration service. |
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