Chapter 20 (beta) of “The Yii Book”)

April 22, 2014

On Sunday night I posted Chapter 20, “Working with Third-Party Libraries,” of “The Yii Book”. The chapter is 39 pages long as a PDF, with the following contents:

Installation
Accessing Library Classes
Working with Composer
Using Symfony
Using Swift Mailer
Using Elasticsearch
Most of the chapter covers Elasticsearch, creating the shell of a search engine. This rules out the need for Chapter 24, “Implementing a Search Engine,” in my opinion. So, by my count, after this, there are 4 chapters left.

Continue Reading...
In PHP, Web Development , , ,
permalink

Yii 2 Status and Looking Forward

April 14, 2014

As you may already know, the beta of Yii 2 was announced yesterday. Besides being another release, which is a good thing, officially reaching beta status means that no new major features will be added before Yii 2 is released. In other words, what Yii 2 looks like in beta will be pretty close to what Yii 2 is. Yay!

Rather than discussing all, or the most important, changes in Yii 2, I’d recommend you read the announcement page linked above. As for how I imagine this will play out looking forward…

Continue Reading...
In PHP, Web Development , ,
permalink

php[tek] 2014 Keynotes

March 28, 2014

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.

Continue Reading...
In Uncategorized , , ,
permalink

Previewing Chapter 20 of “The Yii Book”

March 14, 2014

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.

Continue Reading...
In MySQL, PHP, Web Development ,
permalink

Understanding Forms and MVC in the Yii Framework

March 7, 2014

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.

Continue Reading...
In MySQL, PHP, Web Development , , ,
permalink