Category: php

PHP at FOSDEM 2013
14 January 2013

In case you haven't been following, FOSDEM is a Free Software/Open Source weekend event held every year in Brussels - it's free to attend and it's huge! It's actually a network of smaller events, and this year that includes a whole day of PHP on the Saturday (2nd February 2013 …
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Become a ZCE in 2013
01 January 2013

A few people have told me it's their New Year's resolution to become a ZCE this year, and I'm sure they're not the only ones. I regularly help developers and teams prepare for ZCE, so I thought I'd make up a mini package of tips, tricks and a full set sample questions with solutions and explanations, for anyone who won't be taking a whole preparation course, link below:

Edit: Pack now available from https://leanpub.com/zce

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9 Magic Methods in PHP
11 December 2012

This post forms part of a series of articles about using PHP to do objected oriented programming, or OOP. They were originally published elsewhere but are no longer available at that location, so I'm reposting them here. Previously in the series was an introduction to OOP in PHP, in two parts

The title is a bit of a red herring as PHP has more than 9 magic methods, but these will get you off to a good start using PHP's magic methods. It might be magic, but no wands are required!

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Managing PHP 5.4 Extensions on Ubuntu
29 November 2012

My shiny new VPS* runs Ubuntu 12.10 (official subtitle: Quantal Queztal. Local nickname: Quirky Kestrel) and therefore has PHP 5.4 installed. It's very new so every command I type is missing, and today I realised that included a PECL module (pecl_http, of course). So I aptitude install php5-pear and then get tangled in dev packages (clue: look which libcurl you have already installed to figure out which of a long list of -dev packages to choose), managing finally to emerge with a pecl install http that completes successfully with the words:

configuration option "php_ini" is not set to php.ini location

You should add "extension=http.so" to php.ini

I've been using Ubuntu for some time however, and we don't put settings straight into php.ini, there's a directory called /etc/php5/conf.d/ where all the various module configurations live, or you can enable things just for when PHP is called by apache or from the CLI. However today I hopped into /etc/php5/ and saw this:

.

├── apache2

├── cli

├── conf.d

└── mods-available

Hmmm ... mods-available ?

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A Little More OOP in PHP
31 October 2012

This post forms part of a series of articles about using PHP to do objected oriented programming, or OOP. They were originally published elsewhere but are no longer available at that location, so I'm reposting them here.

This post follows an earlier entry introducing the basics OOP and what that looks like in PHP. This time around we'll look at some more advanced concepts and some more practical examples of building code, covering use of constructors and how to add access modifiers in to control how calling code can operate on your objects. We'll also show off how to create static methods and properties and, perhaps more importantly, illustrate applications of these features.

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PHP at FOSDEM: Call for Papers
30 October 2012

There's an excellent open source conference that happens every year in Brussels in February, called FOSDEM. It consists of some main tracks, plus a series of sub-rooms, where various technical communities are given some space to use for whichever talks they choose; the schedules are centralised so that people can …
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Introduction to PHP OOP
15 October 2012

This is the first in a series of articles about using PHP to do objected oriented programming, or OOP. They were originally published elsewhere but are no longer available at that location, so I'm reposting them here.

Since the introduction of PHP 5 in 2004, PHP has had an object model worthy of that description and became a truly modern language for use on the web. Earlier PHP scripts would have been of the kind where, to quote from Alice's Adventures, you would "Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop." Nowadays that very procedural approach is less common in PHP, so this article takes a look at some of the basic object oriented features available in the language and shows some examples of using them with code examples.

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Confident Coding: San Francisco
11 October 2012

While I'm in the US in a week or so, I'll be joining a stellar lineup at Confident Coding on October 20th in San Francisco. This is a by-women, for-women event to let us get together in a safe space where there are no stupid questions, and try to cover …
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PHP for Drupalistas
04 September 2012

There's an exciting new venture coming up soon - something I've been working on with Emma Jane for a while (yes, Lorna Jane and Emma Jane, we know) - it's called phpfordevelopers.com. From the site:

This spring Emma Jane and Lorna Jane were chatting about PHP and Drupal and workshops and came to the conclusion that Drupal developers were not necessarily equipped for Drupal 8. With all of the Drupalisms in the Drupal code, it can sometimes be difficult to implement code that is both a Drupal best practice and a PHP best practice. While there are many workshops on how to teach PHP developers how to Drupal, there were no workshops teaching Drupal developers how to PHP. Until now!

My theory is that most developers working with CMSes like Drupal think they don't know much PHP ... but of course they actually know quite a lot! The newer versions make more use of OOP and new PHP features, but nothing that's really rocket science (although the symfony components are very nice). This course is a chance for us to give a more solid grounding to those skills that developers just pick up along the way, and give some time to master those skills in a safe environment.

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Skills Allied to PHP
17 August 2012

This post is mostly about a tutorial I will be delivering at PHPNW on October 5th in Manchester, UK, and why I think a tutorial that contains no PHP belongs at a PHP conference

In October, I'll be delivering a tutorial at the mighty PHPNW Conference which contains very little PHP. Why? Because I think, as developers, it's our other professional skills that suffer. As a consultant, I work with lots of different teams, and it is very rare for code to be the problem (and the one time it was, it wasn't the only problem!).

In web development, our biggest challenges are not writing code, we can do that. But getting the code safely from one place to another, with many people's work preserved, having our platform(s) correctly configured and understanding how to use them, making use of the tools in the ecosystem which will help us improve the quality of our code; these are the big challenges we face, and that's why I proposed this workshop and why I think all these topics are important.

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Validating Email Addresses in PHP
14 August 2012
A very quick snippet today because I've told two people to use this approach in the last few days and both of them told me they didn't know about it. How to check if an email address is valid in PHP: use one of the Filter functions, like this:
```
$email1 …
```
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Installing PEAR Packages Offline
30 July 2012

As with most tools that work really well, I know very little about PEAR. I mean, I use it all the time, and I love it for getting all the extensions installed that I need for the work I do. But I've never made a PEAR package, or channel, and I've been happy to leave all those things in the hands of the smart people who have created what we have today.

However I'm now in a situation where I might need to install PEAR packages with a connection that may or may not be working, and I'm not sure exactly which packages I might need, so I wanted to know whether I could use PEAR as my packaging tool even when I wasn't able to reach the usual channels. And guess what? I can!

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