17 Nov 2014
Packages are great. For PHP, Composer has made modularising your code and managing dependencies within your app easy peasy. The topic of this blog post, however, is about what exactly constitutes a package, and where things do and don't belong. I will be talking in the context of the Laravel, as this is what we use at work, but these points should be roughly relatable to any modern framework that utilises Composer.
26 Jul 2012
I've never really *got* web development frameworks. Sure, I understand what they're trying to achieve and I can appreciate they can save you a lot of time. But I don't see the benefit of them in the long term.
18 Sept 2011
Something dawned on me today when working on my ongoing project to create a lightweight, completely from-scratch PHP framework (I've blogged about this several times if you care to catch up). When you're starting out at something and learning the ropes, your rate of improvement, success and general productivity in the activity is far greater than when you've grasped it. In my experience, this is true of learning PHP
4 Apr 2011
After a rather long time, I've finally finished a stable version of the CMS I've been building for the past 6 months or so. As it turned out, the first website to be built using it was a rather tiny portolio website for my good friend and upcoming artist extraordinaire Thomas Fox, which, whilst clearly and concisely displays Tom's artwork, doesn't show off the strengths and flexibility of the CMS framework.
4 Jan 2011
I've been rather busy the last couple of months having a go at building my own PHP CMS, modelled on the MVC design pattern. At work, I'm currently using a rather large, feature-stuffed home-baked CMS, brewed in-house by our PHP freelancer. Learning the ins and outs of this system over the past 6 months has inspired me to have a go at building my own. Two months later and, well, I'm still working on it. But I like to think it's certainly getting there.
22 Sept 2010
When learning the ins and outs of web design, after learning the obligatory HTML and CSS, the next logical step for most is learning a server-side language; the most popular choice being PHP. PHP opens up the possibilities of what can be acheived on a webpage and often bridges the gap between web design and web development for most.