April – 2010 – techPortal

Tips for Working with DateTime in PHP April 29, 2010

Recently we published a post about tips for dates and times in PHP, today I thought I'd follow on from Michael and add some more tips. In PHP 5.2 there is an object oriented approach to working with dates and times - the DateTime class! In the newer PHP 5.3 versions even more excellent functionality was added. This is a short post to introduce this functionality with a focus on the methods available in PHP 5.2 showing some simple examples of how we can more easily manipulate and display dates without needing to work with timestamps.
Everything you always wanted to know about UTF-8 (but never dared to ask) April 27, 2010

Speaker: Juliette Reinders Folmer

With PHP6 in the works and said to be fully UTF-8 compliant, the interest in the community in using UTF-8 has grown. On top of that, with PHP entering the – often multilingual – enterprise web playing field, the benefits UTF-8 can bring are getting more attention.

Unfortunately most developers at one point or another run into problems implementing UTF-8.

In this talk I will cover UTF-8 from the basic linguistics, through client-side aspects to all the steps you need to take to tackle the most common (and some more obscure) issues when using UTF-8 in a database driven PHP application.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (44.8MB)
DPCRadio: Agile PHP Software Development April 21, 2010

Thorsten Rinne

Every PHP developer knows about Scrum, eXtreme Programming and Crystal Clear. But do you know how these methods fit in agile software development to release the software on time? The certified scrum master Thorsten Rinne will present a customer project where all these methods were used in the hard daily work. He will present short indtroductions for each method and will talk about pitfalls to the audience.

You can find Thorsten's slides here on slideshare

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (89.5MB)
Writing a Custom Magento Module April 20, 2010

The aim of this tutorial is to provide a good reference guide to keep with you when developing custom modules with ecommerce solution Magento. It details some of the key sections of how to build a custom Magento module, some of the concepts, assumptions and key points that that you are likely to encounter on a regular basis when building ecommerce installations with this software.

While Magento does not have a great reputation for documentation, there are some good resources available, including the Magento Wiki and php|architect’s Guide to Programming Magento. I used both of these when working for Session Digital as part of Ibuildings and I highly recommend them to you, along with the Magento Forums. Looking through these splintered resources can be time-consuming so in this article I give you the key details when building a module in Magento.
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Building a platform from open source at Yahoo! April 13, 2010

Speaker: Dustin Whittle

Join us for a case study on using open source tools to build a platform for enterprise web applications. Find out what worked and what didn't when building scalable web applications with open source tools (apache, php/apc, mysql, memcache, symfony, yui). Learn how you can tools Yahoo! offers for developers and how your team can leverage Yahoo's Open Stack for your next web project. We will examine the components that make up Yahoo!'s open stack: developer tools (YUI), data APIs (YQL), and the application platform (YAP).

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (49.1MB)
Counting Pages in a PDF April 7, 2010

Recently I worked on an application where a user can upload a PDF document. Only the number of pages have to be validated: there need to be at least 10 of them. I googled around for a bit and I came across some libraries which could do it for me, for example Imagick. With the 'identify' command it is possible to count the number of pages, but for some reason it just returned '1' in some cases, although there were a lot more pages. On top of that, it felt like I created a lot of overhead to add Imagick as a dependency just to count pages.

So I googled some more and found a tiny piece of code for counting pages in a PDF. It's only 2 lines, exteremely fast, and it works for all the different documents I tested: text only, text with images, images only.

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