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.

One of the problems with technical writing is that the instructions you provide will eventually become outdated. Some details, such as the fundamentals of a programming language like C, Ruby, or PHP, change relatively slowly. Others, like libraries, frameworks, and browsers, change frequently. And so, it was not surprising to find out that PayPal changed some of their systems a while back in a way that will affect readers of my " Effortless E-commerce with PHP and MySQL" book. This issue first appeared last summer in my support forums, with Sean and Michael discovering the problem and the solution.

So progress on “The Yii Book” in the past month has not gone as well as I would have liked. And, sadly, progress has been poor for no particular reason other than my own ability to get things done. These things do happen to us all, but it doesn’t mean I’m happy about. Still, even though it’s been slow, progress is being made. A quick status report…

In this edition…

• About This Newsletter
• What Were You Thinking? => Going Big, Macro Version
• What is Larry Thinking => Two Keywords for “Big” Programming
• Q&A => How do you write flexible code?
• Q&A => What do you think about Sass, Compass, and Haml?
• On the Web => CoffeeScript at Dropbox
• Larry Ullman’s Book News => “The Yii Book”

I just recently discovered the Web site LayoutIt!. LayoutIt! provides a Web-based drag-and-drop interface for creating HTML layouts using the Twitter Bootstrap framework. For someone like me, with no design skills whatsoever, Twitter Bootstrap and this new LayoutIt! tool are wonderful inventions.

When it comes to running a business, a lot of the discussion and effort goes towards getting new clients. Getting new clients is important, of course, especially when you’re just getting started, but I believe that many business and people don’t focus enough on the clients they already have. As happy as you are when you get a new project and client, how long is it before your eyes start to wander to that next possible job? This is natural, and certainly I’ve been guilty of it myself. But I would argue that you should put at least as much thought and effort into treating your current clients right as you put into getting new clients. Let’s look at the why’s and how’s…