We often consider improvements from what they’ll cost us, in time, effort, or money, in the short term and undervaluing the long-term benefits we’ll get. We cover practices that look daunting but are worthwhile in this issue, including PHP refactoring tools like Rector, Commands and Queries, PHP Unit, Strategic Domain-Driven Design, Livewire, and more.

What is the biggest problem in PHP in 2021? Many PHP developers are stuck with old codebases, with old frameworks or patterns (if any). Sometimes we work with projects without Composer or PSR-4 autoloading. For some of us, using PHP 7.0 is a luxury far beyond our dreams.

Welcome to the third installment of our containerization journey. Last month we covered running our application locally in Docker containers replacing our pre-existing development virtual machine. We used Laravel Sail to scaffold our development environment with Docker Compose. This month we’re going to look at a real-world application running on a traditional Linux Virtual Private […]

How might we keep the next PHP project from evolving into the dreaded Big Ball of Mud? This month we’ll explore and build a possible foundational structure, a “composite.” Then, having built out this structure, we’ll realize that we might still be over-engineering things a bit—but this structure remains a necessary step along the way.

This month, “The Quest,” takes us on a quest to avoid the Big Ball of Mud. We’ll begin by learning what the Big Ball of Mud is. Our quest will discover that Domain-Driven Design (DDD) can be our solution, but the current state of the art does not quite (to the best of my knowledge) […]

In this Episode Edward Barnard returns to talk with Eric van Johnson and John Congdon about writing columns for the magazine and more. How he got started programming with CRAY supercomputers and then web development first with PERL and then PHP. Rescuing his first article submission from the spam bin. The inspiration and focus for […]

PHP projects generally focus on rapid development. The PHP ecosystem allows us to develop new ideas in mere hours or even minutes. However, over the years, many PHP projects reach the point where changes take radically longer. There’s a high risk of breaking something else—which is the worst possible outcome when the company depends on […]

In Episode 30 In this episode, we dive into How Magento is Evolving and chat with Magento evangelist Ben Marks. Topics The free magazine issue courtesy of Adobe and Magento. An interview with Ben Marks on how Magento went from an open-source project to its acquisition, the value of the community and ecosystem, how Magento […]

For December 2019, we take a look at this month’s issue “Expedition PHP.” Topics include mental health, migrating PHP frameworks, and contributing to open-source projects.  Our guest this month, Michael Akopov, dives into using Laravel Vapor to deploy serverless applications.

Any career today requires continual learning and curiosity for success. Building web applications with PHP is not exempt. The PHP of today is light-years better than the scripts that initially made up “Personal Home Page/Form Interpreter.” In this issue, we examine moving between frameworks, understanding your mental health, contributing to open source, and more.