Lorna Mitchell gave a presentation at php[tek] 2013 last week titled “Tools for Better PHP“. I did not attend the presentation (because I wasn’t at php[tek] 2013), but I just reviewed the slides she posted at SpeakerDeck. In the presentation, Ms. Mitchell talks about some useful development and operations software that PHP programmers ought to consider using.
A couple of the tools, such as PHPDocumentor, are fairly common and easy to use. Others, such as the Continuous Integration (CI) tool Jenkins, are less known among PHP developers, particularly those working on relatively simple, static sites. Not everyone has the need for CI, but it’s good to be aware of how you’d go about doing that should the day come.
At the end of the presentation, Ms. Mitchell suggests Supervisord and Gearman. Supervisord is a process monitoring system, especially useful if you have lots of worker tasks on your server. Gearman is a worker tool, letting you assign tasks to balance the work load for what complex sites need.
If you like that presentation, Ms. Mitchell has several others at SpeakerDeck for you to consider.
