Brightball

Articles about PHP

No such thing as "real programming"

Business | Life | PHP | - July 20, 2015 // Barry @ freeCodeCamp

I read an article earlier today called The self-hating Web Developer that I found on Hacker News and it bothered me. It resonated with me as something that I professionally internalized over my career but it bothered me because Joseph encountered personal financial difficulty for both himself and his family due to the struggle. For that reason (and insomnia), I feel compelled to write this as reference to refer to for anybody else who may be struggling with the same thing.

Go from a PHP Perspective Presentation

Golang | PHP | Ruby | - April 16, 2015 // Barry @ Upstate PHP

Here are the slides from my recent presentation to UpstatePHP in Greenville, looking at Go (Golang) from a PHP Perspective.

Code is the Cure for Developaralysis

Ruby | PHP | - October 22, 2014 // Barry

A couple of days ago, TechCrunch ran a column about Developaralysis that hit a little close to home. Developaralysis is defined as "the crippling sense that the software industry is evolving so fast that no one person can possibly keep up." This results in otherwise accomplished developers freezing up when trying to make decisions about the best language / framework / cloud platform to use for their project. There is a cure and it involves code. A code specifically.

What's the "right" PHP Framework? Presentation

PHP | Rails | CakePHP | Ruby | - June 21, 2014 // Barry @ Upstate PHP

This is a presentation that I recently gave at UpstatePHP in Greenville evaluating the framework landscape in PHP. We discussed why there are so many, history, goals, benefits, concerns and ultimately a recommendation.

String localization with dynamic content in CakePHP

CakePHP | PHP | i18n | - June 20, 2009 // Barry

Cake has a wonderful shell script function built into it called extract that will run through your code and create a .po file full of all of the text contained within your __('My text here') calls. You can then pass these files onto to translators to modify them for your languages. When you want to add variables though, you have to break it up into pieces which may change the context of the phrase. Here's a way around that.

WYSIWYGPro Helper and tutorial for CakePHP

PHP | CakePHP | - June 14, 2009 // Barry

I couldn't find any resources on setting up WYSIWYGPro with Cake so I developed this helper along with instructions for total integration with your system. If you've never used WYSIWYGPro, you should check out the demos. I've tried every WYSIWYG editor out there and none of the other ones even come close as far as I'm concerned.

PublishableBehavior for CakePHP

CakePHP | PHP | - June 10, 2009 // Barry

PublishableBehavior allows the use of datetime fields for start and end ranges on content. Included functionality allows for checking published status, toggling to published / unpublished status, and adding conditions to a find to properly filter those results.

Smoother CakePHP date/time fields with jQuery

PHP | CakePHP | - April 22, 2009 // Barry

While working with the date/time input fields in Cake I got tired of having to select 3/6 drop down boxes to choose all of the date/time information and specifically of having to select 3/6 drop down boxes if I decided to clear the date. A little bit of jQuery will clear this right up though.

Automatically loading your ACL tables

PHP | CakePHP | - January 27, 2009 // Barry

If you've spent anytime wanting to use ACL on your applications, you know how tedious it can be to manually enter your entire controller and action structure. This Task will handle finding and loading or updating all of those for you whenever you run it from the command line.