Freek.dev

The database model behind WordPress doesn’t follow several good database design rules and conventions. When we’re designing a database for a specific purpose, knowing all its desired functionalities in advance, we can follow all of those rules. But WordPress needs to cover anything that anyone could have in mind, so sacrificing foreign keys and using EAV is something that must be done.

http://www.vertabelo.com/blog/technical-articles/wordpress-behind-the-scenes-part-2

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Over at the Tighten blog Samantha Geitz posted an amazing introduction to React. She starts off by clearly explaining how to setup the environment (webpack and a few dependencies). After making sure that it all works, she continues by building a GIF search engine. Along the way the core concepts of React are explained. If you're in any way interesting in learning React, I warmly recommend reading the entire piece.

React itself is reasonably well-documented and easy to pick up, once you can shift your thinking to align with its conventions. The problem is, if you want to build robust apps, the V in MVC probably isn't going to cut it, and you have to dive into the often-confusing ecosystem surrounding React.

In this series, we're going to walk through the stages of building a React application — an app that lets you search the Giphy API and displays results, similar to what Giphy has on its own website.

In this first article, we are going to build the application using only React (with Webpack for asset compilation).

http://blog.tighten.co/react-101-building-a-gif-search-engine

I'm looking forward to read the next articles of this series.

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Virtually every website displays some sort of menu. Generating html menus might seem simple, but it can become complex very quickly. Not only do you have to render some basic html, but you also have to manage which item is active. If a menu has a submenu you'll also want the parents of an active…

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Organizing code is a core skill for software developers and as with all skills the most effective way to improve is to reflect on your previous choices and the fallout from them. There are a wide array of different strategies for organizing code and learning to recognize both the useful and the dangerous ones is very important.

https://medium.com/@msandin/strategies-for-organizing-code-2c9d690b6f33#.3fcr619nk

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Transfer.sh is a free service by Dutchcoders that allows you to easily share files from the command line. Here's an example of how you can use it:

transfer my-favorite-file.txt

The given file will be uploaded to the transfer.sh-servers and the command will respond with a short url linking to that file. Pretty neat!

The only thing you need to do is set up a bash function called "transfer" (you can name it anything you want really).

Don't trust the transfer.sh with your supersecret files? Then you can set up your own server to transfer the files to.

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A few years ago all the projects I worked on were served on a shared hosting environment. It was quite common that a client had ftp access to server to upload some files. A control like Cpanel or Plesk made it really easy to create some ftp accounts. Fast forward to today. Most projects are hosted…

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Most databases will contain some records that must be cleaned up. The reasons why a record can become unneeded are diverse: maybe it's a temporary record that was only needed for a little while if you're logging stuff to a table, a record may become too old to be of interest anymore ... To help a…

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Jeroen Moens posted a, very well written, article on paying technical debt in a legacy codebase.

How can you get a legacy codebase under control and bring it to a new level of maturity? This post summarises my advice and lessons learned from years of working on a large legacy web application.

http://marketing.intracto.com/paying-technical-debt-how-to-rescue-legacy-code-through-refactoring

On a sidenote: as an Artisan I always like to sneak in a little Laravel in legacy projects. There are a lot of Illuminate components take can be used independently outside Laravel. If you want to do this too take a look at Matt Stauffer's Torch repo on GitHub.

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I had a blast at this year's PHP UK Conference. There were some amazing sessions and interesting people to talk to. Together with Hannes, I even started a little hobby project.

If you weren't able to attend, you'll be glad to know that all talks were recorded and are available now on YouTube.

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Mohamed Said created a package that saves all mails sent out by a Laravel application to html files on disk. This can be incredibly useful when designing and debugging mails. It's implemented as a Laravel mail driver. Once installed you'll only have to change your driver to preview.

Take a look at the package on GitHub.

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Eric L. Barnes, the curator of Laravel News, recently launched his new website called dotdev. It aims to be a resource for developers who want to read quality reviews and tutorials amongst other things.

Although the site in general doesn't focus on Laravel, Eric wrote a good introductory post for people who are new to the framework. Unlike most beginner level articles, it focuses on creating a real world application.

My goal with this is to create a guide for those just learning the framework. It is setup to take you from the very beginning of an idea into a real deployable application. ... I am attempting to go through the process of creating a new application just as I would in a real world environment. In fact, the code and idea is taken from a project that I built.

https://dotdev.co/tutorials/step-by-step-guide-to-building-your-first-laravel-application/

For the first batch of posts on the site I made a playlist for coding late at night. Do you have something to share that would interest the readers of dotdev? Read these guidelines on guest posting first, and thenemail Eric.

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The last few months have been my first opportunity to do automated testing at my full-time job. As I’ve been trying to get the hang of it, my biggest question has been how many of each type to test to write: how many unit, integration, and acceptance tests. Turns out Folks Got Opinions™ on this! As I researched, I found at least four different approaches to testing, and they each provide different answers to a number of questions I had.

http://codingitwrong.com/2016/02/08/approaches-to-testing-a-survey.html

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Mattias Geniar posted an overview of how to take care of SEO from a technical standpoint:

If you're the owner or maintainer of a website, you know SEO matters. A lot. This guide is meant to be an accurate list of all technical aspects of search engine optimisation.

There's a lot more to being "SEO friendly" than just the technical part. Content is, as always, still king. It doesn't matter how technically OK your site is, if the content isn't up to snuff, it won't do you much good.

But the technical parts do matter, after all.

https://ma.ttias.be/technical-guide-seo/

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Broken images are ugly. But they don’t always have to be. We can use CSS to apply styles to the element to provide a better experience than the default.

http://bitsofco.de/styling-broken-images/

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Mohamed Said made a great overview of new features that will be added to Laravel 5.2.23

By the time of writing this post, Laravel has 911 contributors on GitHub, some of them are actively adding awesome stuff to the framework on a daily basis. This is a wrap up for the new stuff in Laravel 5.2.23.

http://themsaid.github.io/laravel-5-2-23-20160305/

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Sebastian De Deyne on his blog:

Dynamic languages allow us to pass anything as a parameter without requiring a specific type. In turn, this means we often need to handle some extra validation for the data that comes in to our objects.

This is a lightweight post on handling your incoming values effectively by normalizing them as soon as possible. It's a simple guideline worth keeping in mind which will help you keep your code easier to reason about.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2016/normalize-your-values-on-input

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Today our team released a new major version of laravel-backup. It can backup the files and databases of your application to one or more external filesystems. It uses Laravel's native cloud filesystem to do this. The package can also notify you via Slack and/or email when something goes wrong with…

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Yesterday our newest package laravel-feed was released. It makes generating RSS feeds in Laravel very easy. It's very opinionated to fit the needs of our projects, but I believe lots of other developers will find it useful too. There's almost no coding involved to create some feeds. Installation…

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Michael Stivala, the Maltese Artisan, wrote a nice introduction to Elasticsearch and how you can use it in Laravel.

In this post we’ll explore Elasticsearch; the basics of search and how to set it up with Laravel, Homestead and even Forge. Even though there are resources out there, I couldn’t find the one article that summarised everything I needed to get up and running in as short a time as possible.

https://michaelstivala.com/learning-elasticsearch-with-laravel

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Mathias Verraes illustrates with practical examples how PHP's type system can be used when designing a system.

Below is an attempt at illustrating a design/redesign process I went through at a client, who’s started refactoring the core systems their business depends on. Design is the part of software development that is the most messy, the hardest to fit into rules or well-defined processes. In fact, while writing this post, I tweeted:

“There are surprisingly few software design books that recommend taking a walk, a shower, or a nap, as an important step.”

None of the solutions offered below should be taken as truth. I may have already changed my mind on some of them by the time you read them.

http://verraes.net/2016/02/type-safety-and-money/

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