I’m a huge fan of the service architecture paradigm - and that means that I use services in my controllers to handle persistence. I wanted to abstract the add and update methods from my services and put them into an abstract class. In addition, I didn’t want to have to specify the exact method - I just wanted to call save on the entity. Finally, I wanted to log it properly and verbosely. (more…)

I love namespaces in PHP as much as the next programmer - but there’s always been something about namespaces in my own applications that bothered me. And that’s when I have similar or identical named services, forms, entities or models. (more…)

One of the things that was really bothering me when I first started using Gearman was my consistently failing doctrine database connection. (more…)

I use Vagrant for most of my server management. One thing I noticed is that my Vagrantfile can get pretty large - especially if I have multiple environments that share the same configuration. (more…)

I can’t help but think a lot of PHP applications have a problem. These beautifully crafted, object oriented, highly engineered applications are still making one vital mistake. And that’s using one of the various templating libraries or languages that PHP has. (more…)

I’m a big fan of PHP DotEnv for creating my environment variables for my scripts. (It’s always a good thing to keep your passwords and credentials separate from your source code, according to OWASP). (more…)

Today I was faced with an interesting quandary about whether I should write the code to exploit an application vulnerability in our software at work. This vulnerability is not necessarily a “security” one, but more-so a known-risk: it was theorized that someone with enough knowledge could bypass a mechanism in our software. (more…)

I’m all for coding standards and rigorous approval processes for software in app stores, I really am. However, I’m currently responsible for creating a number of different CMS plugins that all share some code. Unfortunately, that shared library will never follow the coding standards and requirements for all app stores - each has some differences. That’s why I created… (more…)

If you haven’t been following my twitter feed or my open source on github, you might not have seen that I recently released PHProblemLogger, an environment and run-time logger designed to help log everything during an error condition. (more…)

I manage any WordPress plugins I create using git. In order to create a distribution of those, I need to zip up the source code and use that to upload to the marketplace (or directly upload). This was easy with SVN - I just used an svn export command and there we go. (more…)