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Learning PHP and Laravel

Transitioning to a new programming language can have several hurdles associated with it. If you’re going into an entirely different stack, like I have been, you can more than likely bank on needing to set up a completely different environment and finding a new workflow to get into.

There are a few different ways someone could get into their new language or stack – docs, books, or video.  We…

Free SEO Tools for your Small Business: Website Analysis

Free SEO Tools for your Small Business: Website Analysis

Whether you’re putting together your own site, or you have an existing website for your small business, there are some great, free tools to help increase your visibility when people search for your goods and services.

Before jumping into the tools, there are a few things you can do for your site just to get an idea of what to look…

CodeWars: A Method for Learning a New Language

While going back to learn PHP again, I’ve been using CodeWars.comto knock out some fundamentals of the language.  So far, I’ve worked through the tier 8 kyu and 7 kyu problems.  These have ranged from simple things, such as getting the complement symbols for a DNA string and producing the result using a simple switch, to figuring out if a string is an isogram. We can use this isogram example to…

A PHP MVC Framework: Part 4

Config.php

When we created the Database class, we needed to define some of the constants that we were going to use for creating connections with PDO.  We are going to define them in the config.php file, and use them in our application. We are also going to define a few other useful constants that we can have ready to use, without needing to repeatedly type them out.

First, let’s create our…

A PHP MVC Framework: Part 3

The Database and Controller classes

In this section, we are going to start with that Database class.  We will be using the PDO class to connect our PHP code and a database.  If you’ve never used the PDO class, we can do a quick and dirty overview.

PDO stands for PHP Data Objects, and is an extension that defines a lightweight and consistent interface for accessing databases.  This layer is…

A PHP MVC Framework: Part 2

A PHP MVC Framework Cont.

Continuing on from A PHP Framework: Part 1, we are now going to get into more of the meat and potatoes of the framework.

We have previously created three library files: Controller, Core, and Database.  These three soon-to-be classes are the underpinnings of our framework. The Core class will have some functionality that will set the structure for the rest of how…

A PHP MVC Framework: Part 1

A Better Approach to PHP

When I learned PHP at the technical college that I attended, the first thing our instructor said was that he never used it.  We were told to use the Murach PHPmanual and learn with that.  It was okay, but there definitely wasn’t an MVC or framework pattern used.  For the index.php file, we used a massive switch to control what action was being called by the end-user. …