Custom Post Types in WordPress

By Andrea Roenning

Custom post types are the key to taking a WordPress website from a simple blog to a robust system for managing many types of content and data. They help create a WordPress administrator experience which makes it easy for editors to add and edit repetitive content and gives the developer flexibility to create unique web pages to fit the site’s individual needs.

The Flexibility of Drupal 8

By Michael Miles

This article demonstrates six different methods of changing content and functionality in Drupal. Each method requires a different skill set and level of expertise, from non-technical inexperienced users to advanced Drupal developers. For each method, we describe the components, skills, knowledge, and limitations involved. The goal is to highlight Drupal’s flexibility as a Content Management framework.

How to Learn PHP Unit Testing With Katas

By David Hayes

Sometimes code is first tested when the unfortunate client or user feels like using the feature and tests the developer’s work. Hopefully, they’re not disappointed. That’s why you should be interested in unit testing and Test-Driven Development (TDD)—because it makes your life as a programmer better. It would have saved me hours of work in situations like those outlined in the last paragraph. TDD and automated testing let us focus on what we’re there for: solving complicated problems with code and leaving the computers to do more of the rest.

It’s About Time

By Colin DeCarlo

As applications scale and gain adoption, dates and time become much more of a concern than they once were. Bugs crop up, and developers start learning the woes of time zones and daylight saving time. Why did that reminder get sent a day early? How could that comment have been made at 5:30 a.m. if the post didn’t get published until 9:00 a.m.? Indiana has how man time zones?!

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The Dev Lead Trenches: Creating a Culture

By Chris Tankersley

I have spent much time talking about creating and managing a working team, but there is one important piece I’ve left out of the puzzle until now—creating and crafting a culture that makes people want to work on your team and stay on your team. If you have a company culture which does not attract people, employees will be hard to find.

The Workshop: Producing Packages, Part Three

By Joe Ferguson

Over the past two months we’ve been building PHP Easy Math a purposely simple example library to demonstrate how to build a reusable package for the PHP ecosystem. Make sure to check the previous issues if you’re just now joining us! This article is the third and final installment in this series. We’re going to cover triaging and managing issues users may open as well as pull requests to your library.

Education Station: Interview Coding Challenges

By Edward Barnard

Meanwhile, the days where employees stay with the same company 20-30 years are long gone. We move around or move on from contract to contract. For many of us, this means formal job interviews. Many of those interviews include coding challenges; that can be a problem. Let’s talk about that!

Security Corner: Adventures in Hashing

By Eric Mann

Last month, the PHP community had the opportunity to come together for the excellent php[world] conference in Washington, D.C. As part of the event, we held a hackathon to work through some of the challenges posed by Cryptopals. Some of the cryptographic primitives we discussed were hashes, and it’s useful to take a more in-depth look at what they are and how to use them in PHP.

Community Corner: Community Review 2018

By James Titcumb

The final days of 2018 are looming on us, and I wanted to take a look back on some of the things, good and bad, that happened in and around the PHP community this year.

finally{}: The Seven Deadly Sins of Programming: Greed

By Eli White

As you are reading this magazine, we are in a time of winter holidays and typically associated with a spirit of goodwill towards others. That is embodied often as giving presents to people as a gesture of that goodwill. Unfortunately, this can have the opposite effect at times of causing greed to form as people want more and more given to them. Alternatively, they may misinterpret it as greed, as a specific green haired character learns in his holiday tale.