Pragmatism in the real world
The PHPNW Conference is an annual conference held in Manchester, now in its 3rd year and again I was invited to speak. The organisation of PHPNW was top-notch as usual with everything running smoothly from my point of view. I'm sure there were a few hectic moments for the organisers though :) The day started with Lorna's keynote on how to improve your skill set as a team. This was a great talk which sparked… continue reading.
I recently received an email asking for my advice about how to handle a form that appears on every page. I want to add a newsletter sign up box to layout.phtml so it will appear on every page. The layout->content() comes from several different action controllers… So how do I handle the newsletter sign up? I thought that the answer is long-winded enough to be worth writing a blog post about. One way to do… continue reading.
Following some discussions with friends who've recently started using OS X, I thought I'd note down some tips and tricks that I've learnt since I moved to Mac. This is in no particular order as it's taken from IRC logs of conversations I've had :) Basics There's one menu bar for all application Closing the last window doesn't exit the application. Use cmd+q or the Quit menu item on the "application name" menu. System Preferences… continue reading.
Vikram Vaswani has written an article on Manipulating Configuration Data with Zend_Config. Zend_Config seemed to meet my needs, so I played with it a little and then deployed it in a couple of projects. It did everything I needed it to, and was easy to integrate with both framework and non-framework PHP projects. It also has a couple of neat features, such as the ability to merge multiple configurations together. Keep reading and I'll give… continue reading.
I've started playing with the development versions of ZF 2.0 and one of the first things I thought I'd do was to port Akrabat_Db_Schema_Manager. It turned out to be reasonably easy. All I needed to do was rework my use of ZF components to use the new ZF2 ones. Whilst I was at it, I also converted it to use namespaces. I also had to reorganise the http://github.com/akrabat/Akrabat library so that I could have ZF1… continue reading.
Note: this article does not refer to the released version of Zend Framework 2!. If you want to play with the development versions of Zend Framework 2.0, then it's handy to be able to create ZF2 projects using the ZendTool command line tool. Rather unhelpfully, ZF2's ZendTool uses the same ini file (~/.zf.ini) as ZF1's Zend_Tool and the same zf.sh script filename, so you can't just put zf2 on to your path and it'll all… continue reading.
TweetGT is a simple application that talks to Twitter. I wrote it as I couldn't find another way to send a geotagged tweet sent from an arbitrary location. Also, my friend Cal Evans says that writing a Twitter app is the new Hello World, so I thought I'd better find out how to do it! Obviously, I used Zend Framework :) The source is up on github so you can have a look at the… continue reading.
I've been reading the Proposal for Exceptions in ZF2 and like it. One thing that caught my attention was that it suggests that you can catch an interface. I hadn't heard of that ability before, so I pulled out my trusty text editor to have a play. Consider this code: <?php namespace My; interface ExceptionInterface {} class SplExceptionClass extends InvalidArgumentException implements ExceptionInterface {} class ExceptionClass extends Exception implements ExceptionInterface {} class A { static function… continue reading.
Testing controllers has traditionally been a hassle due to the requirements of setting up the bootstrap, the front controller and initiating the dispatch cycle. In June, Matthew addressed this with the release of Zend_Test_PHPUnit_ControllerTestCase way back in 2008. Later, Matthew helpfully wrote an article on how to use it and I have used that as a starting point for the information here. (Thanks Matthew!) The project I'm using is TodoIt, which is a simple ZF… continue reading.
My friend Cal Evans is putting on a virtual conference called Day Camp 4 Developers. The most interesting thing about this conference is that it is about the "soft skills" that you need as a developer. There are many conferences that deal withe the technical skills improvements that you need, but less that handle the rest of your job, so this piqued my interest. It's a one day tech-agnostic conference containing 5 sessions and all… continue reading.
