“Effortless E-commerce with PHP and MySQL (2nd Edition)” Giveaway

May 5, 2014

Approximately 1,000 years ago (or 5 months), I promised to give away copies of my “Effortless E-commerce with PHP and MySQL (2nd Edition)” book to those people that have purchased “The Yii Book”. The only problem is I had to create the code to do that. Which I now have. And it may even work.

If you’re interested in possibly winning a copy, log into your account. Then click the “Giveaway” link that appears in the navigation sidebar. If you can’t recall your password, use the reset link.

Pesky details of this giveaway…

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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