I’m quite happy to say that I’ll be one of two keynote speakers at php\[tek\] 2014! The opening keynote is from Terry Chay, Director of Features Engineering for Wikimedia Foundation. He’ll be discussing the technology challenges faced by Wikipedia. On the second morning, I’ll relay an inspiring story about how to get where you want to be in your career, based upon my own experiences.

The conference takes place in the great city of Chicago (well, just outside of the city), from May 21st to the 23rd, with training and tutorial days preceding the conference itself. You can read on to get more details about the two keynotes, and don’t forget to check the full schedule and speaker list on the php\[tek\] website to see all the other great talks that are being offered.

I’m hard at work on Chapter 20, “Working with Third-Party Libraries,” of " The Yii Book", and making decent progress. The goal of the chapter, really, is to explain how to include third-party libraries without getting a ton of errors about not being able to find the class definition. If you’ve played around in this area at all, then you’ll know what I’m talking about: simple libraries, namespaces, autoloaders…it can get complicated.

HTML forms are one of the key pieces of any website. As is the case with many things, creating forms while using a framework such as Yii is significantly different than creating forms using standard HTML alone. In Chapter 9, “Working with Forms,” of " The Yii Book", you’ll learn what you need to know to create HTML forms when using the Yii framework. You’ll comprehend the fundamentals of forms in Yii and see a few recipes for common form needs.

This is an excerpt from Chapter 9, “Working with Forms,” of " The Yii Book".

I generally don’t like to link to things that require that you sign in to access the content, but I thought this question and answer on Quora was worth sharing. The question is: " Why is it hard to scale a database, in layman’s terms?" To which Paul King put forth a useful and easy to understand answer.

\[tek\]

is one of the best-regarded PHP conferences around, and this year you’ll again find an all-star line-up (plus me). The conference itself runs for 2.5 days, from May 21st to the 23rd, with one additional tutorial day and a training day (on the 20th and 19th, respectively).

On Friday evening, I officially released version 0.8 of “The Yii Book” (Chapter 19 had previously been released in rough format). This update includes over 55 pages of new content, which I call Chapter 19, “Extending Yii”. This is a 10% increase in the book’s total length, and by far the longest chapter in the book. You can download the latest version from the account page.