Taming Twig—Crafting High-Quality DRY Templates

By Gert Wijnalda

We spend a great deal of time organizing our code, but our frontend templates don’t always receive the same care and attention. Using the approach outlined in this article, we can build a library of reusable components that make templating easy, more efficient, and fun!

The New CSS

By Bryan Robinson

Believe it or not, CSS is awesome. No, wait! Come back! It’s a new day for our styles on the web. There have been so many advancements in the past five years to what we can accomplish with CSS that you probably haven’t had a chance to keep up.

Advanced Caching for High Throughput Dynamic Sites

By Matthew Hellinger

User tolerance for long website and application load times is extremely low. While PHP 7 produces considerably more efficient code than its predecessors, caching is vital for being able to meet performance expectations in high traffic environments. This article presents PHP-native caching options so developers can meet user expectations without needing to over-complicate the web stack.

Education Station: What Went Wrong

By Chris Tankersley

The very first thing you need to do when something goes wrong is to get a good handle on the situation and find out what’s wrong. Many users first instincts are to get frustrated and say, “This is broken!” and expect you to figure it out. While there can be lots of places to look, narrowing down the possible causes can help greatly.

Security Corner: The Risk of Lists

By Eric Mann

The OWASP Top Ten is required reading for anyone in software development, regardless of whether or not your role focuses on security. It’s a useful guide to get you started thinking from a strong security mindset. Be careful, however, to avoid thinking the list is exhaustive or provides comprehensive security for your application or system.

Internal Apparatus: Patterns in the Code

By Edward Barnard

The PHP compiler source code includes many patterns that can be frustrating and intimidating, because they are so different from typical PHP code, until we understand the structure and context. C’s preprocessor has a significant role in these unfamiliar patterns. We look at several of these patterns in the compiler’s PHP Array implementation.

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

By Eli White

For our final installment of this series, it’s time for us to address Wrath in how it relates to programming. Wrath, commonly known as Anger, in the middle ages was considered the opposite of Love. Those who were wrathful had spurned love, choosing to act in rage instead. I saved it for last in this series because it manifests in many different ways in life and code.