Chris Hartjes has started up a new series on his blog about converting legacy applications over to shiny, new CakePHP framework versions.
In my rapidly dwidling spare time I have been working on a project to convert an existing site for a legal services company over to PHP. I'm *this* close to being done, so I thought I'd share what I went through to get to where I am right now. [...] So after giving the code review I was asked to do the rewrite. The client realized that they had some serious maintenance issues on their hands and were in the process of creating a new look-and-feel for the site. Being the framework guy that I am, I indicated that porting the code over to a framework would be the best way to reduce maintenance issues going forward.
The series will document the process he followed to convert the application over. In part two he'll get into the meat of things - reworking the database structure.
NETTUTS.com has posted the third part of their series on creating a simple PHP5 framework today:
Now that we've got a basic framework (see part 1 and part 2 of this series), we can start thinking about integrating designs with our PHP framework. For now, we'll concentrate on the front-end design, including how we can make it easy to 'skin' our new framework.
This part looks mostly at the HTML and CSS for the presentation layer (the views) to make a simple two-column layout with some basic image and text content.
The O'Reilly School of Technology now offers a series of PHP certification classes developers can attend to learn more about PHP and SQL on a variety of projects.
The PHP/SQL Programming Certificate Series is comprised of four courses covering beginning to advanced PHP programming, beginning to advanced database programming using the SQL language, database theory, and integrated Web 2.0 programming using PHP and SQL on the Unix/Linux mySQL platform.
Another class will be released in December 2008 - PHP/SQL 3: Seamless Web 2.0 Integration . The classes come it at a bit under $400 USD and include access to an online sandbox for testing (complete with web server, unix-shell and database installations). Completion of all four courses earns the student a certification from the University of Illinois's Professional Development department.
A new post to the Solar blog takes a look at a set of included tools the framework offers for working with command-line applications.
One of the nice things Solar has to offer is its CLI (Command Line Interface), which can be used to accomplish tasks that would otherwise eat up valuable time, such as creating a new project, applications, models, tests, and documentation. In this entry, and others that will follow, I will be showing you how to use the current (Solar v1.0.0 alpha2) CLI, detailing commands, available options, parameters, and usage examples.
This entry is the first in a series on the subject and gives just the basics of the cli component - where to find it, how get help with its functionality (a "help" command) and some resources to get more information.
Padraic Brady has revisited the older parts of his blog tutorials in a new post today (parts one through eight of the series) in anticipation of number nine to be released soon.
By now many readers are aware of the all-consuming mega tutorial I've been writing illustrating one method of writing a blog application with the Zend Framework. What started initially as a possible book project switched over to a more open process of blog posts with a future PDF version as a standard reference project. Back during the Summer I had to put the series on hold, but it's time to get kicking again.
A list of links to the previous parts is included as well as a brief look forward at some of his plans for the series (including a method to convert from the post's format into Docbook for easy translation into HTML or PDF).
NETTUTS has posted the second part of their series looking at the basics of CakePHP and how you can get started developing.
In our last CakePHP tutorial we looked at setting up the CakePHP framework and introduced some of the framework's basic concepts and terminology [...] In the next set of tutorials we will build the blog application incrementally so that the basic CakePHP development process is laid out clearly instead of briefly mentioned as in other similar tutorials. In this tutorial we start with a basic authoring authentication component for the example blog application.
He's broken it down into a few steps - defining the goal of the application, creating the models to interface with the database, making the views to output the results and making the controllers to bind it all together.
Robert Basic has posted the second part of his introduction to the Zend Framework series (here's part one).
This post is the second part of my introductory text on Zend Framework, Starting with Zend Framework. This time I cover the basics about controllers, actions, view scripts and view helpers. On request routing and the Front Controller I will write one (or more) big post(s), so this part won't be explained now. I will also skip explaining the models; they deserve their own post.
He goes a step further and looks at Controllers - what they are and some intro steps to you making one of your own - and the parts around them, the views, actions and view helpers.
Brandon Savage has posted the second part of his debugging in PHP series today - this time he looks at stepping it up with a powerful tool XDebug.
There are two really great experiences in my PHP life: the day I learned how to use PHP, and the day I installed XDebug. Ok, perhaps that's an overstatement, but XDebug is one of the best tools I've ever used. I think every developer should use it, and for the next part of this series we're going to talk about its features.
You'll need to get it set up yourself (complete instructions are on the XDebug site) but Brandon includes an example of the code you can use to toss information back out to your dugging client of choice (as well as some of the resulting output).
In a five part series on the symfony blog, Fabien Potencier relates a call to the expert, a refactoring story where he helped out a fellow symfony developer with their first application.
Some time ago, Vince, a seasoned PHP developer, asked me to have a look at his very first symfony project, a product store. As the mistakes he did were quite common, I decided to tell you the story of this refactoring session in the hope you will learn as much as Vince did
DevShed starts off a new series today focusing on security in web applications, specifically in PHP-based ones, with this first article - an overview.
With the web and web sites open to everyone -- including malicious hackers -- the security of web applications sits at the top of the list of issues on any web developer's mind. In this eight-part series, we will look at the security concerns of PHP developers, and what they can do to make their web applications more secure.
They talk about the importance of having a security plan from the start and look at a few simple steps to get started with in enhancing your application's security - the proper use of register globals, using error reporting to correctly catch problems and how to minimize the code exposure of your app.
