Advanced Sites Deserve Advanced Custom Fields

Building WordPress meta boxes has gotten easier over time, but it can still be a daunting task for a new theme or plugin developer. Fortunately, Elliot Condon’s powerful (and free!) Advanced Custom Fields plugin makes creating complex meta boxes, repeaters, and more a cinch. We’ll take a look at the plugin, walk through some practical examples of building carousels, alternate page headlines, and more, and then discuss the future of the plugin with the upcoming ACF 5 release. by Steve Grunwell

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Drupalese 101

Drupal is powered by a community of over a million people in more than two hundred countries, who work hard to keep it updated, running and safe. Because it’s a massive tool that provides infinite opportunities for customization, the Drupal interface involves a lot of keywords and jargon, which can easily become confusing for newcomers. This article defines 20 basic terms that the Drupal community uses to help control and classify the concepts of Drupal. by Annika Garbers

ProcessWire: Flexibility, Power, and a Generous Dose of Pure Fun

You wouldn’t be wrong in assuming that ProcessWire is a content management system—and as a content management system it provides a slick and streamlined admin GUI with a lot of cool features. Up until this point, it’s not unlike what you would expect from any CMS product out there nowadays, really. The content management system is only the surface, however. Beneath it is a whole different system, one with more flexibility and power than you might expect at first glance. At this level ProcessWire packs a lean, mean, and powerful content management framework with an extensive, fluent developer API. by Teppo Koivula

PHP Tips and Tricks

PHP is a very extensive language that’s meant to deal with every web problem, and there are many ways of doing things. Some are nicer than others because the code is more readable or because the code is more optimized. Today, we’re going to explain some PHP behaviors that may not be easy to understand at first—but which are not bugs either!—and things happening in the low-level layers that you may remember about when using the related features. Are you ready to become a more productive PHP developer? By Julien Pauli

Laravel Tips: Queues

Queues are great tools for making your applications more responsive, scalable, and loosely coupled. In this article, we’ll identify the right use cases for queues, learn how Laravel simplifies interaction with several popular queuing solutions, and implement our own queue-enabled mini-application. by Dirk Merkel

Community Corner: December 2014

With the recent hack at Sony and other leaks, let’s discuss something that everyone knows is important yet rarely takes as seriously as they should: security. The topic of security is vast. You can’t follow a checklist or curriculum and be safe. However, you should keep up to date and be sure your local community gets regular updates from the security folks. by Joe Devon

Education Station: Get Your PHP Sound in the Cloud with SoundCloud

I thought I’d indulge myself this month, with a project I’ve been wanting to get into for some time. I don’t know about you, but I’m a bit of an audio fan, and one service I’ve been wanting to play with is SoundCloud. In light of that, this month’s column is dedicated to seeing how we, as PHP developers, can interact with SoundCloud’s API for fun and, potentially, for profit. By Matthew Setter

finally{}: Another Year Draws to a Close

My December columns have become a time for reflection, and so I want to continue that trend. This column marks the 24th that I’ve written, and two years since musketeers.me acquired php[architect]. The PHP community continues to amaze me, as it continues to grow. by Eli White