Browse category Development
Community Corner: My Picks From Packagist
Most people are aware of how the Composer revolution came about, and the goal of getting everyone to play nicely together. With so many packages it can sometimes be difficult to know where to begin. I’m going to look at some packages from the open source community you might find useful if you’re not already using them!
PHP Sessions in Depth
Sessions in PHP are often taken for granted. A session is a magic array which persists across page loads and holds user-specific data. It’s a fantastic and integral part of most web applications. But when misused, sessions can cause substantial security holes, performance and scalability problems, and data corruption. A deep understanding of sessions is vital to production web development in PHP.
Managing Private Dependencies
Using Composer and a private package server is the most efficient way to manage private dependencies with PHP. I recommend using the software as a service, Private Packagist, or Satis, the open source, self-hosted package server. In this article, I’ll show you how to easily set this up for your own projects.
Community Corner: PHP TestFest Has Returned!
PHP TestFest is a global event organized by the PHP community at large, where an effort is made each time to increase the test coverage of the PHP engine itself. Learn how you and your user group can participate.
Generating an Autoloader for a Legacy PHP Codebase
If you’ve inherited a legacy code base, you may find it does not use an autoloader and has an idiosyncratic directory and file hierarchy for its Classes, Interfaces or Traits. Worse yet, it might not use name spaces consistently or at all. So you can’t use a PSR-4—or even PSR-0—autoloader with your code. Well, why […]
Testing Your Drupal Site with Behat
If automated testing is not already part of your development workflow, then it’s time to get started. In this post, I’ll show you how to use Behat to test that your Drupal site is working properly.
Mandrill Alternatives for PHP Applications
What would a website be if it couldn’t send emails, even if just for password resets? Running your own mail server is a huge hassle, so many developers instead use a third party service to send transactional emails like password resets, new user welcome messages, and order summaries. One of the most popular services, in […]
Encryption is Not So Easy
This morning, during my usual scan of Feedly/Twitter/Reddit I read Secure the data of visitors on your Drupal website better. The post shows you how to use the Field encryption module. The Field encryption module ensures that the values stored in the Drupal database are encrypted. When the database ends up in the wrong hands, […]
Exporting Drupal Nodes with PHP and Drush
With Drupal, it’s possible to build very intricate solutions by gluing the right combination of contrib modules together. Of course, there is a downside to relying only on contrib modules, particularly for one-off or highly custom tasks. Bringing in a contrib module means you assume responsibility for feeding and caring for it. If it’s a […]
Vagrant with GUIs and Windows
Last week, I had the pleasure to present at the Drupal NoVA meetup group about using Vagrant to automate setting up development environments for your projects. Using a VM has been the single biggest change to my workflow in recent years, no matter what CMS or framework I’m using on it. You can view the […]
