Freek.dev

On his blog Christoph Rumpel explains how you, using BotMan, can create a bot where users can subscribe to content updates.

Email has been a great channel for staying in touch with your audience for years. But times are changing and messengers are taking over communication. Let's see how I used Facebook Messenger to build a little newsletter bot for my upcoming book "Build Chatbots with PHP".

https://christoph-rumpel.com/2018/02/build-a-newsletter-chatbot-in-php-part-1

Pretty cool! I might add a bot to this very blog soon.

Read more

phpCE 2017 was held last november in Rawa Mazowiecka in Poland. The organisers recently released videos of all the talks. You'll can watch them all using this YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWKBHVGdyqQKjzraZqkQ69PJQmnGdXrVa

Here's the recording of Hannes Van de Vreken's talk on IoC containers.

Read more

On the Hackernoon site Nicolò Pignatelli wrote a good guide on how to write Value objects in a good way.

This is the list you must always check it against:

• it is immutable and no setters defined;
• it reflects the semantics of the domain;
• it shows how information flows and is transformed during runtime;
• it hasn’t default or useless getter methods;
• it can be compared to other Value Objects of the - - same class by reading private properties directly

https://hackernoon.com/value-objects-like-a-pro-f1bfc1548c72

Read more

Sebastiaan Luca, a freelance Laravel developer from Antwerp, coded up a couple of functions that mimic a pipe operator.

An interesting RFC proposal by Sara Golemon submitted in April 2016 suggested the use of a pipe operator to enable method chaining for any value and method. Yet as of today, it's still being discussed and there's no saying if it will ever make its way into PHP. So in the meantime, here's a solution!

https://blog.sebastiaanluca.com/enabling-php-method-chaining-with-a-makeshift-pipe-operator

Let's hope a real pipe operator will land someday in PHP.

I'm hopeful. Done well, I think it needs partial function application first, so that no additional syntax is required for the rhs.

— SaraMG (@SaraMG) February 21, 2018

Read more

? Ever wanted to use the same controller to serve multiple formats?

Check out this set of macros that let you hit a single endpoint with different extensions to request the format you want:https://t.co/2sFGNf97be pic.twitter.com/HMNdicUWAy

— Adam Wathan (@adamwathan) February 15, 2018

?? Here's what it looks like in use: pic.twitter.com/zHo0GlAU6w

— Adam Wathan (@adamwathan) February 15, 2018

Read more [twitter.com]

???? Forgot about this little validation trick that had snuck by undocumented. pic.twitter.com/Hb5QUJY3ix

— Taylor Otwell ????‍♂️ (@taylorotwell) February 11, 2018

Read more [twitter.com]

Frank de Jonge, creator and maintainer of Flysystem, recently started using Docker to test the FTP driver. On his blog he explains the why and how.

For Flysystem, an open source PHP package to deal with filesystems, I needed a way to test FTP (barf) interactions. FTP servers are notoriously bad at abiding by the spec. ... For Flysystem's FTP(d) adapter an integration test, using an actual FTP server, brought back the level of confidence it needed.

https://blog.frankdejonge.nl/regaining-trust-in-your-tests-with-docker/

Read more

Small #PHP tip: Want to before sure multiple keys of an array are set? Define them in one isset() call, it's so much clearer!

if ( ! isset($a['q']) || ! isset($a['w']) || ! isset($a['e'])) {
// PANIC
}

# Becomes

if ( ! isset($a['q'], $a['w'], $a['e'])) {
// OH NO!
}

— Frank de Jonge (@frankdejonge) February 12, 2018

Read more [twitter.com]

Laravel 5.6 will probably ship this wednesday. One of the cool new features is the ability to register Blade component aliases, which was PRed by my colleague Seb. On his blog Seb guides you through the new functionality.

Laravel 5.6 adds the ability to register alias directives for Blade components. Let's review some background information and examples.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2018/blade-component-aliases-in-laravel-56

Read more

Together with Dries Vints and Frederick Vanbrabant I organise our local usergroup PHP Antwerp. We recently bought some A/V equipment to record all the awesome talks given at our meetup. Here's the first one: a fine talk by Bobby Bouwmann about some cool design patterns used in Laravel.

Read more

Laravel 5.5.29 introduced the ability to group a collection on multiple levels. In a new post on his blog, Christopher Rumpel demonstrates the new feature with some good examples.

https://christoph-rumpel.com/2018/01/groupby-multiple-levels-in-laravel

Read more

Barry Van Veen shares how you can install a package from a local path into your project. This is extremely handy when developing a package because you can immediately toy with it in a full application.

This article explains how you can require a package from a local path into your project with Composer. This way you can run a local copy of a repository and test any changes you make. Because the local repo will be symlinked changes are shared in real-time, there is no need for intermediate committing and updating.

https://barryvanveen.nl/blog/44-package-development-run-a-package-from-a-local-directory

Read more

The Vancouver PHP user group recently had a Q&A session with Laravel's creator Taylor Otwell.

Cool Nova tidbit revealed in the video: it'll be a package.

Read more

In a new post on his blog Matthieu Napoli, creator of PHP-DI, explains how he made v6 much faster.

But the good thing is that, after 6 years of existence, the project has matured and is now quite stable. The original objectives are met, even though there is of course always room for improvements and innovation. There is room to push the container to be better on other levels. And the most obvious one is performances.

PHP-DI 6 will be much, much faster because it is a compiled container.

http://php-di.org/news/21-php-di-6-compiled-container.html

Read more

My colleague Brent has some good thoughts on where to place curly brackets.

Dedicating a whole blogpost to curly brackets might seem like overkill but I believe it's worth thinking about them. Not just because of one curly bracket, but because there's a bigger message in all this. Thinking about how we read and write code not only improves the quality of that code, it also increases our own and others ease of mind when working with it. It can improve the fluency of your work and free your mind to think about real important stuff.

https://www.stitcher.io/blog/where-a-curly-bracket-belongs

Read more

Cristopher Rumpel recently launched a big redesign of his blog. In a new post he touches on why he moved away from his old solution, and what kind of problems he had to solved. Great read!

One of my resolutions for 2017 was to redesign my blog. One week before the new year I faced myself with the challenge and thought to myself if this was still doable. Somehow I managed it and here it is. In this article I will explain the process and show you how I redesigned the blog with Tailwind CSS and moved it from Jekyll to Laravel with keeping almost the same performance.

https://christoph-rumpel.com/2018/01/how-i-redesigned-my-blog-and-moved-it-from-jekyll-to-laravel

Read more