Welcome to this latest edition of PHP Weekly, with plenty of conference news :)



With the Web&PHP Conference fast approaching, this week we have an exclusive offer for our subscribers. Book now for the Workshops Day and receive a 20% discount on the ticket price!



Last chance to get tickets for the Northeast PHP Conference, which kicks off tomorrow in Boston, MA.



Finally, the latest online Day Camp 4 Developers has been announced, for October 18th. This time the focus is on Programming PHP Securely.



Get involved with your PHP Community.



Have a good week!



Katie

Articles Thoughts on the PHP Documentation Redesign

UX Enthusiast, Andy Fleming, takes a look at the php.net redesign that's in progress. The article covers some improvements to readability, visual hierarchy and other important aspects of the user experience.



Visit From An Old Friend: Counter.PHP

Vicente Diaz writes - Around one year ago I posted about what were the most common web attacks in Spain and how the malware was spread. It is time for an update.



Stateful vs Stateless CSRF Defences - Know the Difference

Stateless CSRF defences are required in applications where the user has no session. That might sound a bit weird, but not all applications require sessions and their architecture may be such that they do not synchronise session data across servers.



20+ PHP Best Practices That You Must Follow

This article attempts to teach you with some of the best practices of one of the most widely used programming languages in the world, PHP. There are many beginners or even experienced PHP developers who don’t bother to follow the best practices of the language, either unintentionally or intentionally.



Tutorials and Talks The "D" Doesn't Stand for Dependency Injection

You’ve probably heard of the acronym SOLID by now, which is an object oriented programming paradigm consisting of five basic (but interrelated principles) of object oriented development. And you’ve probably heard once or twice that the D in SOLID stands for Dependency Injection. Actually, if you’re lucky you’ve also heard what it really stands for, which is the Dependency Inversion Principle. But, in PHP, this is often conflated with dependency injection.



How to Check and Create PHP Session Variables

In this article you will learn some simple things to work with sessions in php. These are mostly used to store information about your users, like usernames, choices selected by users and similar. These however are stored on the server and deleted once the user closes the browser. To interact with session variables you need to carefully create them, check them and accordingly do something based on their value. This is actually the main topic of this article, how to check and create php session variables.



Constructing hard regular expressions with VerbalExpressions

Most newbie (and some seasoned) programmers have difficultly constructing Regular Expressions. Many a time one needs to create a Regexp quickly to test a particular piece of code. However, not being comfortable withe Regexps can be a problem. VerbalExpressions is a PHP library that enables you to construct regular expressions using natural language like constructs. Think of it like a DSL for building Regexps.



Setting up Zend Server 6 on OS X for PHP development

Rob Allen writes - I recently decided to upgrade my Mac's PHP to 5.4. One of the available options is Zend Server 6.1, Free edition. These are my notes how to set it up so that it works the way I develop.



Making PHP Development with MAMP PRO Work For Me

Sean Hellwig writes - Here at ThoughtMatrix, we do a considerable amount of PHP development. We work with everything from Drupal and WordPress to Zend Framework, Concrete5, CodeIgniter and custom home-grown apps. It’s necessary for me to have a local LAMP environment so I can quickly and efficiently set up and work on new and existing projects. About four years ago, I made the switch to MAMP. The fact that MAMP was a completely self-contained LAMP stack appealed to me as I’ve had some bad experiences in the past using Mac’s native PHP and Apache—OS updates would wipe out the customisations I had made. Shortly after starting to use MAMP, I became sick of manually editing my hosts file and adding new Virtual Host directives to MAMP’s Apache config. Enter MAMP PRO.



Convert HTML to PDF with Dompdf

PDF is a standard format originally created by Adobe for representing text and images in a fixed-layout document. It’s not uncommon for a web application to support downloading data, such as invoices or reports, in PDF format, so in this article we’ll go through how we can easily generate PDF documents using PHP.



Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 (PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On Fedora 19

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Fedora 19 server with PHP5 support (through PHP-FPM) and MySQL support. PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features useful for sites of any size, especially busier sites.



Checking out Sylius: Symfony2 e-commerce

Lukas Kahwe Smith writes - Last Friday we did a one day hackday with the goal of checking out the Symfony2 based e-commerce solution Sylius. We did not have any specific agenda and decided to just install and start exploring. For the most part this was a quite painless experience. It just takes a while when 7 people clog up a wifi connection.

News and Announcements



Web & PHP Magazine Invites You to it's First Ever Conference

This 3 day conference, taking place in San Jose, CA this September, will immerse you in a world of continuously evolving web technologies. Sticking with our ethos of open knowledge sharing and community support, all conference sessions, keynote presentations, hacks and Expo on September 17 & 18 are FREE to attend! Whether your interests lay in core PHP, security, testing, architecture, frameworks, cloud, HTML5, CSS3, responsive design, UX, mobile web or web-based mobile apps, our final program of sessions, workshops and keynote presentations will have something for you. There will also be a pre-conference day with hands-on workshops and deep-dive tutorials, allowing you to work with and learn from some of the leading experts in their field. With this special discount code: WPC13PN you can access the Workshops Day for the special price of $160 instead of $199.



Northeast PHP Conference 2013 Boston, MA, August 16-18th

Last Chance For Tickets! The Northeast PHP Conference is a web developer conference focused on PHP, Web Technology, and UX. There has been a lot of demand for such a conference in this region, and we are excited to be hosting it for the second time. We are bringing in over 300 attendees from across the northeast and beyond.



Celebrate the first stable release of phpDocumentor2!

We have spent the past two months fixing bugs, adding tests and writing a brand new template. With this release it is now easier than ever to generate your documentation.



Day Camp 4 Developers - Programming PHP Securely

October 18, 2013, 9:00 AM CST — 1:30 PM CST, On-Line. Four experts on the subject of "Programming PHP Securely" share their knowledge to help you write programs that are more difficult to hack. Programs that will keep your data, and your customers data, safer.



Reading and Viewing

Beginning PHP RIA Using ExtJS (by Andrew Strickland, published August 12th 2013)

Beginning PHP RIA using ExtJS offers an introduction to building RIAs with ExtJS, geared specifically for PHP developers. Learn how to build familiar-looking interfaces, move data to the interface smoothly using PHP, and debug your RIA to eliminate user interface issues.



Web & PHP Conference Speaker Interview

Get to know the guest speakers for the upcoming conference. A short Q&A session with Stefan Priebsch.



Jobs If you have a position that needs filling, let us know and we will include it.



Performance Telecom (UK) seek freelancer (Remote worker) - Python and PHP Developer

This position is primarily Python, but PHP skills are also required.



Senior PHP Developer in Bucharest, Romania

We are searching for a passionate PHP developer who will be part of a team of senior programmers and experienced testing engineers, directly involved in technical development projects, using Agile Scrum as methodology.



PHP Engineers for Bright.Com in San Francisco

We are looking for PHP engineers to join our growing team! The ideal candidate is language agnostic, and can work with both scripting languages (such as Python and PHP) as well as strongly typed languages (such as C++ and Java), and has a passion for taking an idea and exploring, tinkering, debating, and demonstrating the fastest, most efficient, flexible and scalable implementation approaches. Experience working with traditional SQL databases as well as newer technologies, indexes and data stores is key (such as Solr, ElasticSearch, Redis, or Neo4j), and you must be comfortable using Linux and other open source technologies.



Ballers Bridge is Hiring a Sr. Yii Developer

We are looking for a motivated and outstanding candidate to lead our product development. The ideal candidate is an experienced problem solver, quick thinker/learner, self-motivated and not afraid of challenges.



Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

wave-framework

Wave is a lightweight MVC framework written in PHP.



nette

Nette Framework is a popular tool for PHP web development. It is designed to be the most usable and friendliest as possible. It focuses on security and performance and is definitely one of the safest PHP frameworks. Nette Framework speaks your language and helps you to easily build better websites.



cervo

Cervo is a lightweight and highly modular structure framework for PHP.



ciconia

A new fully extensible markdown parser for PHP5.4. Ciconia is the collection of extension, so you can replace, add or remove each parsing mechanism.



phpexiftool

Exiftool is a powerfull library and command line utility for reading, writing and editing meta information written in Perl. PHPExiftool provides an intuitive object oriented interface to read and write metadatas.



geerlingguy/Ping

A PHP class to ping hosts. There are a ton of different methods of pinging a server using PHP, and I've found most to be poorly documented or downright dangerous in their implementation. Therefore, I've created this simple class, which incorporates the three most popular ping methods (exec() with the system's ping utility, fsockopen(), and socket_create()).



geerlingguy/Imap

A simple PHP wrapper class for PHP's IMAP-related email handling functions. This class includes many convenience methods to help take the headache out of dealing with emails in PHP.



grunt-php

Start a PHP server. Pretty much a drop-in replacement for grunt-contrib-connect. Useful for eg. running tests on a PHP project. Uses the built-in server in PHP 5.4.0+.



PHPVerbalExpressions

VerbalExpressions is a PHP library that helps to construct hard regular expressions.



php-debugbar

The DebugBar integrates easily in any projects and can display profiling data from any part of your application. It comes built-in with data collectors for standard PHP features and popular projects. Displays a debug bar in the browser with information from php. No more var_dump() in your code!



bulletphp

A resource-oriented micro PHP framework built around HTTP URIs.



bootstrap-cms

A PHP CMS powered by Laravel 4.0 with Sentry 2.0



FurryBear

A PHP wrapper for Sunlight Congress API v3



transmission-php

This library provides an interface to the Transmission bit-torrent downloader. It provides means to get and remove torrents from the downloader as well as adding new torrents to the download queue.