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PSR-What?
16 July 2013
Read moreThere's been some cool things happening in the PHP world over the last few years, but with the least helpful names ever ... yes, those PSR-somethings which all do totally different things (apart from two of them which are the same). They're actually all superb things, and done for a good reason, so I thought I'd try to translate them into normal speak.
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Twitter Search API Using PHP and Guzzle
11 July 2013
Read moreIn case you missed it, Twitter updated their APIs recently, so that you have to authenticate to use even their search APIs to return publicly-available results. This is an increasing trend for API providers, to provide either very limited or nonexistent access for unauthenticated users, I think so they can rate limit consumers that swamp them. To cut a long story short, that meant I needed to update my dashboards that keep an eye on twitter searches to do more than just call file_get_contents in the general direction of the right URL.
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PHP Version Adoption
04 June 2013
Read morePHP runs over 75% of all websites whose technologies are known (source: w3techs), which makes for a really REALLY long tail of users who once installed wordpress, phpmyadmin, or some other open source project that helped their business needs at the time. What they don't do is upgrade. PHP's current …
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Simplest PHP Generator Example
22 May 2013
Read moreI really like the generators feature that's arriving in PHP 5.5, and since we're now into release candidate releases, it's actually not that far away. I've been speaking on this topic and I thought I'd share my trivially simple code example from my slides.
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Setting Multiple Headers in a PHP Stream Context
07 May 2013
Read moreLast week I tried to create a PHP stream context which set multiple headers; an Authorization header and a Content-Type header. All the examples I could find showed headers built up as a string with newlines added manually, which seemed pretty clunky and not-streams-like to me.
In fact, you've been …
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Video Course on Learnable: OOP PHP
28 March 2013
Read moreI'm delighted to announce that my new video course on Object-Oriented PHP is now available on Learnable! It's very much an introduction, aiming to cover WHY objects are so cool as well as how to declare and use one. The course is a mix of video (filmed in my kitchen …
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First Phing Plugin
25 March 2013
Read moreI'm a huge fan of Phing and use it regularly for build and deployment tasks. Often, I'll ask about a plugin that I wish existed, and get a very courteous "patches welcome" from the nice people in the #phing channel on freenode. This has happened a few times, so I thought I should probably look at how to make a new phing plugin, this article shows you how to make the simplest thing I could think of: a simple "hello world" plugin.
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PHP and Gearman: Unable to connect after upgrade
28 February 2013
Read moreI upgraded PHP and related pecl modules on my development machine today, and ran into a problem with Gearman. Actually I ran into more than one! Firstly the challenge of getting the newest pecl version working with a gearman version. Then an error where my existing PHP application couldn't connect to gearman after upgrade.
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Talking about ZCE at PHPNW March
27 February 2013
Read moreIf you're interested in becoming a Zend Certified Engineer and are local enough to make it to the next PHP North West User Group meeting on Tuesday, 5th March in Manchester (UK), then come along! I'll be giving a talk and welcoming questions and discussion around becoming ZCE, why you …
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New Book: PHP Web Services
18 February 2013
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I'm delighted to announce that my new book "PHP Web Services" is now available as an early release! This is a project that I've been working hard on for the last few months, trying to put my extensive and hard-won experience of working with APIs into words and examples to make it easy for others to get up to speed in this area. -
Zend Webinar on PHP 5.4: 19th February
24 January 2013
Read moreI am pleased to announce that I'll be presenting one of Zend's webinars in February, on Tuesday 19th. The topic is "The PHP 5.4 Features You'll Actually Use", and the session is my opportunity to round up the best of the new features that came in with PHP 5 …
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PHP 5.4 Timezone Error Message on Ubuntu
16 January 2013
Read moreQuick post because this tripped me up the other day: When you use a vanilla ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" installation, it will come with PHP 5.4, which is excellent news. However the default php.ini doesn't set the timezone, so you will see an error like:
It is …