php

Namespaces have existed in PHP since version 5.3 to avoid two classes with the same name from different parts of the codebase conflicting…

One of the Protect Earth API volunteers was looking into using Laravel Excel to add “Download CSV” functionality to Protect Earth’s amazing…

I’ve written a few articles about Code of Conducts, which are a hotly debated version of the Anti-Harassment policy you almost certainly…

This is part two of a blog series, about why the PHP community is having a rough time talking about diversity related issues (like code of…

The other week I was out doing a charity bike ride; a Breast Cancer benefit from London to Cambridge. It was a lovely ride with a new group…

Recently there has been a lot of buzz about HTTP middleware in PHP. Since PSR-7 was accepted, everyone and their friend Sherly has been…

Paul Jones recently wrote an article called An Object Lesson in Conduct Enforcement. The title starts off factually inaccurate, and it goes…

The other week I wrote an article called Why is Everyone Outraged?, where I explained how the media often manufactures outrage, making it…

Anyone who knows me better than my Twitter profile will know I have a love/hate relationship with my reputation, and the online persona that…

The last PSR from the FIG to be sent out into the world, to be used by whoever felt like using it, was PSR-4: Autoloader. Now people are…

Today was the feature freeze for PHP 7. That means no new votes can be started for a feature that is aimed at PHP 7.0, and would instead…

Recently Return Types were accepted for PHP 7, which makes me very happy. This RFC was a real work of art. Levi Morrison sidestepped various…

A few months ago I wrote What is The League of Extraordinary Packages?, and it was clearly written in a defensive tone. I wanted to explain…

Some people like to take a quick walk down memory lane in January, and post their highlights of the previous year. Last year (2014) was…

The answer to “What is the State of Markdown?” is “Yes, it’s a f**king state.” Markdown has been around for a long time, since John Gruber…

In the last article I said I wanted to write about when its a good idea to release a component. A lot of this comes down to: is there one…

This is the story of group of friends, who decided to write some code, but somehow confused and angered everyone with a keyboard. tl:dr…

Update 12/12/2014: The answer is now of course PHP 7. There are a few major, important conversations happening in the PHP internals mailing…

This article attempts to convince you that deprecating the PSR-0 auto-loading standard in favor of the PSR-4 auto-loading standard is not…

A new version of Fractal is out, which is a package aimed at making life easier to API developers handling output. At a basic level it acts…

Heroku was - as far as I remember - the first (mainstream) PaaS on the market. It was Ruby-only but it was that symbol of modern web…

Late last summer I was riding my bike around the mountains of New Jersey. I’m not sure if it was exhaustion, the heat or the fact that I had…

I’ve managed to get myself involved in a lot of projects in and around the PHP community because I like to offer my advice, experience and…

There have been a few posts over the last few months saying that the age of the framework is dead, and that Composer is the true savior, and…

When you use Laravel it’s very likely you autoload extra code than just the controllers/models that are autoloaded by default. Some use…

I haven’t really posted about PSR-4 here other than as a footnote in this old article, but if you follow me on Twitter or hang out on Reddit…

Twitter seems to lead to the same thing happening over and over again. I say something I think is entirely uncontroversial People…

Recently I started a new blog series called “Build API’s That You Wont Hate”, starting off with Part 1 - Useful Database Seeding. It was…

Sometimes people link me to articles and ask for my opinions. This one was a real doozy. Oh goody, a framework versus language post. Let’s…

A little while back I produced an article called Building a Decent API which was mostly a tongue-in-cheek list of things that I’d come…

I’ve had static analysis tools running in Sublime Text for a long time, but for most of that time I have had CodeSniffer and it’s PSR-…

On Monday I posted a tale of woe, which like any good tale had a moral at the end. The moral was that while PHP internals has its troubles…

Anyone who has mentioned PHP Fractal of Bad Design to me knows I don’t give it much credit. It’s a list of complaints about loose-typing in…

Update 06/09/2013: I had initially offered to put together an RFC draft updating the original rather dire efforts at documenting PHP’s lack…

An awesome RFC popped up the other day: Syntax for variadic functions, developed by Nikita Popov. I read through it and I loved it, but I…

One of the features implemented in PHP 5.5 was CurlFile, a nice addition to the Curl extension to allow you to specify specific arguments as…

I’m posting this because I have accidentally been perpetuating some FUD, that PHP 5.5 has had its JSON support removed. It hasn’t. Some…

Coding Standards have been around for the longest time and recently they’re starting to become more widespread in PHP. While learning Python…

The PHP Framework Interoperability Group (PHP-FIG) has been around for 4 years, and it’s produced 4 PSR’s, which to some is a sign of…

As programmers we should all be used to the fact that our personal preferences and habits are all subject to change. I used to be a big fan…

As a huge proponent of Composer, a happy user of PSR-0 and a voting member on the PHP-FIG I get into plenty of conversations about all of…

While Composer has been around for a while now, many packages are still in their infancy (< 1.0) or sometimes are just not as feature filled…

One of the fun things about trying to support the PHP-FIG and all the good its doing, is seeing blog posts written complaining about it by…

PSR-2 has been out for a while now, and even though developers from member projects (such as Joomla, Drupal, phpBB, CakePHP, Symfony and…

I recently tweeted something which seems to have confused a lot of people: Now, don’t go running off to PETA, I’m clearing kidding about the…

Yesterday PHP.net announced the release of PHP 5.5 Beta-1. This is a great news after the concerns that merging Zend Optimizer+ would really…

Update 12/12/2014: This ended up getting to #1 on Google for “PHP 6” so I thought it was important to give an update. The article hoped to…

The world today has a lot of hot topics that need to be discussed. Washington needs to get together to help sort out the debt-ceiling to…

There are two kinds of PHP developers. Those who absolutely love static methods because they are easy to work with and those who think they…

This is a repost of my answer to the Quora question: Do a large majority of people hate PHP solely because other people do so? There are a…

PHP is undeniably the most used language when it comes to building web applications. Around 78% of the internet is powered by PHP and the…

I posted an article at the start of the year called 2012: The year of PHP cloud hosting. Well, not really. Sure there are two months left in…

Sorry if I sound like a broken record, but packages are f**king brilliant. I’ve mentioned before that packages are the future of PHP and…

Working as a freelancer and contractor sometimes I come across some code that is so terrible I have to laugh, then immediately tweet a…

Don’t worry guys, this isn’t another PHP apologist or PHP hater blog. We’ve all had enough of those recently. This is a quick heads up on…

You might not expect to hear that from a CodeIgniter and FuelPHP developer, but it’s true. Taylor has done a brilliant job writing code that…

Composer is the best thing for PHP since sliced arrays and using it in your applications means you have easy access to a large selection of…

As a CMS developer on the PyroCMS team, a common problem I have to deal with on an almost daily basis is peoples strange fear of using a CMS…

What is a package? A package is a piece of reusable code that can be dropped into any application and be used without any tinkering to add…

Cloud hosting is nothing new. Seeing as “cloud” is such a loosely used term some will consider their VPS solutions on Slicehost or Rackspace…

Anyone who has used PHP for a while knows that it has its ugly parts. Recently I’ve seen a whole swathe of PHP-bashing articles and that…

After years of being an active member in the CodeIgniter community I have decided it is time to change things up and move on. Where is that…

Having a quiet night in before a long day of kayaking I thought I’d write some fun code instead of banging out the usual shit like I’ve been…

I figured it is about time I start selling some of my work as the number of libraries and projects I have released open-source means I spent…

Many frameworks say they are lightweight, quick and easy on your server, but none are as lightweight as my new “framework” which is so…

I recently came across PHP’s DateTime object and I’m loving it. Working out the first Monday of the month is also quite easy, but has one…