Author Archives: lornajane

09 Oct
2012

PHPNW Tutorial Day

I’ve spent the last few days at PHPNW – it was amazing and inspiring and incredibly sociable from beginning to end but I wanted to share some thoughts about tutorial day in particular. For context, I delivered a full-day tutorial at PHPNW this year, entitled “PHP Tools”, containing the following topics:

  • git
  • apache virtual hosts
  • api documentation
  • static analysis tools
  • profiling with xhprof
  • deployment with phing

Somewhere along the line my attendees were unexpectedly efficient (or I was impatient) and we ended up ahead of my planned schedule, so I asked if anyone had any questions to fill the final hour or so. Continue reading →

26 Sep
2012

Git Cheat Sheet

Today I thought I’d share my “cheat sheet” for git – the commands that I use on a day-to-day basis. I’ve used entirely the command line tools, since those are the same on every platform. GUI tools and IDE plugins are available for git so it is worth taking a look at what is available for the development environment you use.

Checkout/Clone

In git, you don’t checkout code, you clone a repository. You end up with a local repository on your filesystem, which behaves as both the repo and as your working copy. In git, you always clone the whole repo, not a subdirectory, and the metadata is all stored at the top level, in a directory called .git.

When you are ready to clone the repo, create the directory to store it in and change into it. Then type:

git clone [url]

Here’s an example, showing a clone of my private joind.in repo on github. Continue reading →

25 Sep
2012

Github API Access Tokens via Curl

I’m working on some demos for a tutorial I’m giving next month and since I’d like to show off Github’s API, I needed an access token for it. They have the usual web flow but I’m cutting as many corners as I can to keep the demos nice and quick, so I looked into the support Github has for generating an API key programmatically. Continue reading →
18 Sep
2012

API Documentation with IODocs

I write a lot of APIs, and I also preach that your API isn’t finished until it has excellent documentation. Which is great, but that means I therefore have to lead by example and document my APIs :) Enter iodocs from the talented folk at Mashery.

Iodocs is a node.js application (which is fun for a PHP developer. Most developers write a bit of JS, but this one hasn’t). You describe your API and all its methods in JSON, and then iodocs presents an interface for you to enter API keys, add parameters to each request and press the “try it!” button. This makes your API call and shows you the results on screen, which seems like a great way to demonstrate what all the various parameters do!

iodocs screenshot
Continue reading →

06 Sep
2012

Do Open Source with Git and Github

This article originally appeared in the May 2012 php|architect magazine.

Often I find absolutely competent programmers, who aren’t involved in open source, either because they don’t know how to approach a project, or because they just aren’t sure how the process even works. In this article we’ll look at one example, the conference feedback site joind.in, and how you can use GitHub to start contributing code to this project. Since so many projects are hosted on github, this will help you get started with other projects, too.

The tl;dr Version for the Impatient

  1. Fork the main repo so you have your own github repo for the project
  2. Clone your repo onto your development machine
  3. Create a branch
  4. Make changes, commit them
  5. Push your new branch to your github repository
  6. Open a pull request

This article goes through this process in more detail, so you will be able to work with git and github projects as you please.
Continue reading →

04 Sep
2012

PHP for Drupalistas

There’s an exciting new venture coming up soon – something I’ve been working on with Emma Jane for a while (yes, Lorna Jane and Emma Jane, we know) – it’s called phpfordevelopers.com. From the site:

This spring Emma Jane and Lorna Jane were chatting about PHP and Drupal and workshops and came to the conclusion that Drupal developers were not necessarily equipped for Drupal 8. With all of the Drupalisms in the Drupal code, it can sometimes be difficult to implement code that is both a Drupal best practice and a PHP best practice. While there are many workshops on how to teach PHP developers how to Drupal, there were no workshops teaching Drupal developers how to PHP. Until now!

My theory is that most developers working with CMSes like Drupal think they don’t know much PHP … but of course they actually know quite a lot! The newer versions make more use of OOP and new PHP features, but nothing that’s really rocket science (although the symfony components are very nice). This course is a chance for us to give a more solid grounding to those skills that developers just pick up along the way, and give some time to master those skills in a safe environment. Continue reading →

31 Aug
2012

Posting Raw Data with Curl

This week I’ve been working on a feature which handles an incoming API call from an external source (actually Paypal’s IPN service). Making external calls into my development platform isn’t how I usually work, so instead I captured the body of the request that was being sent, and replayed it against my local script using curl.

I put the data into a separate file, data.txt and then used curl to direct that data at my local URL:

curl -X POST http://localhost/app/test.php --data @data.txt

I find this approach useful for testing, but since I had to look up how to do it, I thought I’d put it here for reference!

28 Aug
2012

The Quest for a Payment Gateway

Although I’ve been “making websites” for a lot of years, I’ve mostly avoided the kind where people actually pay for anything. The result of this is that I built Bitestats (elevator pitch: sign up and get a printable summary report of your web stats every month by email) but then got busy and never built the bit where people can actually pay to use it.

I recently carved out some time to correct this situation, and fell into an absolute pit of confusion when I tried to figure out what my options even were. My requirements are that my customers are global, I am UK-based, people will set up a regular subscription, and I don’t have (and I think I don’t want) a merchant account at this point. I’m not PCI compliant and have no intention ever to attempt that. This post is an attempt to round up some things I found out along the way. Continue reading →

17 Aug
2012

Skills Allied to PHP

This post is mostly about a tutorial I will be delivering at PHPNW on October 5th in Manchester, UK, and why I think a tutorial that contains no PHP belongs at a PHP conference

phpnw12 logoIn October, I’ll be delivering a tutorial at the mighty PHPNW Conference which contains very little PHP. Why? Because I think, as developers, it’s our other professional skills that suffer. As a consultant, I work with lots of different teams, and it is very rare for code to be the problem (and the one time it was, it wasn’t the only problem!).

In web development, our biggest challenges are not writing code, we can do that. But getting the code safely from one place to another, with many people’s work preserved, having our platform(s) correctly configured and understanding how to use them, making use of the tools in the ecosystem which will help us improve the quality of our code; these are the big challenges we face, and that’s why I proposed this workshop and why I think all these topics are important. Continue reading →

14 Aug
2012

Validating Email Addresses in PHP

A very quick snippet today because I’ve told two people to use this approach in the last few days and both of them told me they didn’t know about it. How to check if an email address is valid in PHP: use one of the Filter functions, like this:


$email1 = "nonsense.something@dottiness";  // not a valid email
$email2 = "[email protected]";  // valid email

$clean_email1 = filter_var($email1, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL); // $clean_email1 = false
$clean_email2 = filter_var($email2, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL); // $clean_email2 = [email protected]

The Filter extension was new in PHP 5.2, but is one of the unsung heroes of the language. It’s rare for me to ever describe one approach as the “right” way to do something – but for validating data, Filter really is excellent, offering both validating and sanitising filters and generally making it super-easy to clean up incoming variables. Many of the frameworks offer equivalents, and I’m sure many of those are wrapping this too.