Like most content management systems, PyroCMS uses front-end themes. Though PyroCMS themes are built a bit differently than what you might be used to from other systems, they’re still quite easy to create. They’re so easy, in fact, that very little PHP experience is required to assemble them!
Frameworks provide a tool for rapid application development, but often accrue technical debt as rapidly as they allow you to create functionality. Technical debt is created when maintainability isn't a purposeful focus of the developer. Future changes and debugging become costly, due to a lack of unit testing and structure. Here's how to begin structuring your code to achieve testability and maintainability – and save you time.
Reflection is generally defined as a program’s ability to inspect itself and modify its logic at execution time. In less technical terms, reflection is asking an object to tell you about its properties and methods, and altering those members (even private ones). In this lesson, we’ll dig into how this is accomplished, and when it might prove useful.
The concept of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is fairly new to PHP. There’s currently no official AOP support in PHP, but there are some extensions and libraries which implement this feature. In this lesson, Patkos Csaba will use the Go! PHP library to teach you AOP in PHP, and review when it can be helpful.
Dynamic website and application development seems more commonplace than static website creation these days, and with dynamic development comes the need to store data. A popular database management system used alongside the PHP language is the MySQL database, with Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle also being fairly common. The PHP group of developers initially eased connecting between PHP and the database systems using database-system specific functions.
MongoDB is a document database designed for performance and scale while remaining easy for developers to use. MongoDB provides two features that can be considered groundbreaking. First, it works with native language types, so the database works for you rather than you having to conform to it. It feels so natural to simply save arrays or objects that you’ll quickly forget you are using a database. Second, the schema is totally flexible meaning that each record can contain different fields.
There are plenty of articles that explain what design patterns are, and how to implement them; the web doesn’t need yet another one of those articles! Instead, in this article, Patkos Csaba will discuss the when and why, rather than the which and how. He will present different situations and use-cases for patterns, and will also provide short definitions to help those of you who are not so familiar with these specific patterns.
So, you built a website with an amazing strength of potential for millions of internet aficionados to venture, read information, blog, whatever – and maybe make you a few pesos in the big scheme of things. There is a simple, yet powerful tool to gain traffic through: RSS. RSS means Really Simple Syndication. To syndicate just means gather all the information in once place, where people can subscribe via their web browser, to an article list. Creating the entire Custom RSS Feed will take you minutes, literally. You will need three 3 items in all: A make file function at member registration, PHP-XML Hybrid File { template } and output script/feed link.
Just when you think you’ve made something foolproof, God makes a better brand of fool. This maxim of manufacturing also applies to software development, especially on a highly accessible technology like web applications. As much as programmers attempt to anticipate every possible action or combination of actions that a user can take when encountering a web application, no one can foresee them all. When the user takes an unanticipated course of action and breaks the application, the software needs to catch them before they fall.
Have you ever taken a look at the list of functions available in PHP? Andrew Burgess just counted 5025 on the PHP quick reference page. Granted, it depends on what extensions you have enabled, but still: that’s one heap of functions! While he can’t show you every one of them, if you’re new to the language, he will introduce you to seven really handy ones in this quick tip! Let's get started.
