If you are developing a WordPress plugin, it good idea to write some automated tests for it. Pound is a light weight WordPress plugin that will run tests you write for your own plugin. It’s not a framework or library and introduces no dependencies for your plugin. It just runs tests that your write […]
How PHP Frameworks Affect Profitability
Last week we talked about application shelf life an aspect of PHP development that often goes overlooked. This week let’s talk about how the web development framework you use contributes to the shelf life of your app and the profitability of your web application. Photo provided by Jonas Bengtsson
Sublime Text 2 Commands For Mac

Sublime Text 2 is a really nice text editor with a lot of power behind it. It also has a “Vintage” mode for folks who fancy vim, such as myself. I also happen to enjoy exploring new software, especially text editors, and Sublime Text 2 is my current favorite text editor. The only majorly annoying […]
PHP vs Ruby :: 2012 Year End Review

Back in 2007 I wrote an article titled PHP vs Ruby – Practical Language Differences which drew a fair amount of attention. Now that I’ve been working with Ruby in much more depth and both PHP and Ruby have matured dramatically over the past five years it is time to reevaluate the comparison.
camelCase to snake_case

Here is a TextMate command that will convert all of the selected text from camelCase to snake_case. This command is specifically designed for PHP. Thanks to PHP not having namespaces (until recently) many developers use PEAR naming conventions resulting in code that has class names like BP_Common::fancy_function(). This command will not convert the BP_Common.
Reality66 Naming Conventions

Here are the coding standards we use at Reality66. The purpose of these naming conventions and standards is to provide an easy to remember set of rules so all Reality66 developers write consistent code without having to constantly reference coding standards documentation. The primary intent is to have a small, easily memorized set of rules […]
How To Remove Empty Array Elements In PHP

Quick PHP tip: It is common to want to explode a string based on some delimiting character, then iterate over the array. Most of the time you don’t care about the empty items in the array. Suppose, for example, you have a dynamically constructed string of id numbers from a database or something and you […]
What’s The Best PHP Framework?

There is an enormous number of PHP frameworks available so I thought I share my experiences working with some of the most popular frameworks for PHP development. I have personally used all of the frameworks I describe either for my own projects or for actual client work. Here are my notes on how I evaluated […]
Sync Local And Remote Databases For Web Development

I develop WordPress sites, themes, and plugins all the time and have been working on improving my workflow. I have configured our server using git (gitosis) for easy deployment of WordPress (and related files) which I’ll write about in a later post. This post is to share a little script I use for copying my […]