Gulp is an exciting front-end web development workflow system, and NPM is a great package manager. Mixed together they make a great addition to any front-end development toolbelt. This article discusses how they can be used as a build tool for a simple web app.
Logging is hands down the best way to see how your application is behaving. In PHP specifically, the in-built logging functionality is lacking, however using a library like Monolog, together with a centralised logging tool such as Papertrail gives us all of the functionality we need.
Sending emails from a PHP application is a common task, whether it's only for confirmation emails or otherwise. In this tutorial we will use Mandrill (using the PHP SDK) with Beanstalkd (Using the PHP Pheanstalk library) to set up a simple email solution.
MailChimp is a leading provider of mailing lists, and is a great way to make the most out of your audience. In this tutorial we will use the MailChimp PHP SDK along with the Slim framework to build a simple custom AJAX sign-up form.
Migrations are an extremely effective to manage incremental changes in a schema using code, and can be run forwards as well as in reverse. So what tools do we have in the PHP community to acheive this?Phinx is a fantastic schema migration tool which isn't tightly coupled to anything and is compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and SQL Server.
Mink is a PHP package providing a simple API for a multitude of browser automation tools, it can be used to automate browsers for many purposes. The biggest of those purposes is automated functional testing. This tutorial looks at functional testing using Mink and PHPUnit.
Amazon Web Services Simple Queue Service is awesome. For those of you who don't know, SQS is a highly scalable and reliable distributed queueing system. This article goes into how to utilise SQS using the PHP SDK and concludes with an example of how it might be used.