PHP Weekly improvements

http://www.phpweekly.com/archive/latest.html

by inovica • 13 years ago

64 59 13 years ago

phpweekly.com

raveren• 13 years ago

The news are nice, but the RSS feed is terrible - but a headline.

inovica6• 13 years ago

Thanks. We'll improve that

adventured• 13 years ago

Don't be afraid to make the text here:

http://www.phpweekly.com/archive/latest.html

larger, and expand the width of the layout some. If you're going to leverage a simple layout like that in which the text is the sole focus, you might as well go a bit larger font size.

inovica6• 13 years ago

Hi and thanks for the suggestion. As this is an archive from the email itself thats why we used that width.

inovica6• 13 years ago

Hi there. We posted about PHP Weekly last week and we had some really good suggestions from people - mainly about how we'd not done a great job explaining what we are doing!! Took all the suggestions on board and added in an image, latest issue link as well as archives. We've also added in an RSS feed, but I note the comment (on here) about the RSS feed being terrible. Sorry, we'll work on that.

RossM• 13 years ago

Thanks, I must have missed it last week. Looks like a much more readable alternative to phpdeveloper.org (which has too many automated posts imo).

quackerhacker3• 13 years ago

>Dealing with Duplicated Code

Anyone notice the duplicate topic under Tutorials and Talks "Offline Processing in PHP with Advanced Queuing," just gave me a little chuckle when one of the articles is dealing with duplicated code.

Aside from this, I LOVE PHP. A prospective employer was asking if I would be open to learning RoR. Anyone who is experienced on Rails, could you let me know if it's a similar structure as PHP (which I'm great at)? Thanks.

inovica6• 13 years ago

You spotted the deliberate mistake - erm. Whoops. Thanks for pointing that out!

nkozyra3• 13 years ago

As Rails is a framework and not a language, it has a much more specified "structure."

Syntactically, the languages are not all that similar. It's probably closer to Python.

As much as people abhor PHP in programming communities (and I get that sentiment), I find RoR to be a far, far worse platform to build upon.

jiggy20112• 13 years ago

What do you find worse about RoR? Compared to whichever PHP framework.

kbenson5• 13 years ago

Syntactically, the languages are not all that similar. It's probably closer to Python.

My impression was that Ruby is much closer to Perl than Python.

symfoniq• 13 years ago

I've done both PHP and Ruby/Rails professionally. They are quite different. I earned a living with PHP first, but I prefer to use Rails (or Sinatra) for most projects these days.

Even though PHP and Ruby (and therefore Rails) have little in common, I think you can still learn the Rails fundamentals quickly. Check out Michael Hartl's excellent Rails Tutorial. Also, Ryan Bates' Railscasts are a fantastic resource.

quackerhacker3• 13 years ago

Thanks symfoniq. I started with PHP also, and picked it up fairly quickly. I'd learned Ruby regardless, just to work with this dev team and it never hurts to know another language. I really wanted to hear experience from someone who went from php to ruby (since that's what I'd be doing).

Php .net is so well doc'd with an example for almost every function/feature that it made it EXTREMELY easy to pick up. Does Ruby have something similar (really hope it's not -> ruby-lang.org, reminds me of w3), not too keen to Michael Hartl's just cause I'd have to buy it.

vec5• 13 years ago

Speaking as someone who made this exact jump a couple years back, here's the big differences I remember.

* The languages are very different, syntactically. Ruby's blocks and enumerators really don't have an analog in PHP, and they'll take some getting used to. There's also some pretty deep philosophical differences in what the two languages mean by "class". That said, they sit at about the same abstraction layer, so line by line the complexity and flow shouldn't be that big of a jump.

* Rails is more like, say, Zend Framework than raw PHP. It enforces an MVC layout on your code and does what looks at first like a lot of magic to figure out which template files correspond to which pages. When you're starting out the rails scaffold generators are your friend.

* Ruby's standard library has a lot less in it than PHPs, so no XML parser or SQL client out of the box. Gems, and bundler in particular, makes it much easier to add third party code, though. You'll spend a lot more time bikeshedding over which third-party library to use, but the competition generally leads to more pleasant APIs in the long run.

* Ruby convention is to have more files and less code per file. A lot of your template files will only end up being three or four lines long. It's honestly easier in the long run, but get an editor that supports that workflow (multiple tabs, fuzzy file open, find-in-project, etc).

* RoR is almost completely independent of Apache for configuration. You get to move all the logic that was in .htaccess into ruby code in your app somewhere, and you get much more freedom over defining what you want your URLs to look like. You'll need to familiarize yourself with a concept called reverse proxying to figure out how this works in production, though.

* Not strictly ruby, but the rails asset pipeline is magic. Once you get used to it you'll never want to do frontend coding without it.

quackerhacker3• 13 years ago

Seeing as I have no choice to learning Ruby if I become apart of this dev team, this is great to know. One of the greatest strengths that I absolutely utilize all the time in PHP is the libraries (curl, gd2, xml parsing, mysql, ect)...I couldn't imagine doing effective programming without it now.

Oh well, another challenge, another achievement. Thanks Vec!

intendedeffect• 13 years ago

I learned PHP years ago, never got past the "futzing around making a basic CMS" stage with RoR (I currently do most of my work in C# and ObjC). I'm sure I'll be politely corrected in this view, but the piles of add-on gems and scripting utilities that characterize Rails-in-practice meant that Rails struck me as kind of a moving target.

Coming from PHP where basically nothing happens unless you make it happen (for better and very often for worse), I found Rails confusing once you got beyond easy Active Record calls and into using gems. There are tons of add-ons that do useful things, but they do a lot of their work behind the scenes assuming adherence to certain conventions—which, I know, is a strength as well as a weakness, I get it. But that increases the difficulty of jumping past the stage of following a tutorial and just installing one persons collection of gems, scripts and other helpers.

tmzt3• 13 years ago

It really depends on how you write PHP.

If you write Object Oriented PHP and use a framework with strong OOP principals you probably will have no problem learning Rails.

If you've used MVC before, and you understand the role of a Model, View, Controller, data bindings, ORM, etc. then you should have no problem learning Rails.

If all you know is PHP and it's control structures, and you expect your file to be interpreted every time you visit a URL, then you will probably have more difficultly learning Rails.

It would be helpful to know what you love about PHP.

Treffynnon• 13 years ago

Have you seen Wes Mason's PHP Weekly newsletter: http://phpweekly.info? Is this intended as a replacement?

inovica6• 13 years ago

Hi there. We'd actually been running this as a weekly news list for some time (we'd owned the domain for years) via a PHP-related product that I also run. We decided to open this up wider based on seeing the Python Weekly one, as we're also fans of Python. Someone pointed me to Wes last week and I dropped him a line and we have exchanged some friendly emails between us. I need to pick that up again after being away for nearly a week.

rbanffy3• 13 years ago

After reading the linked http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/208-5-Reasons-Why-the-We..., I have to wonder why people still think their favorite technology must "win".

kbenson5• 13 years ago

It may be a response to the PHP hate that's common. PHP is very popular, so an end run around technical merits may be alluring to those that don't know how to argue the merits, can't find enough merits to argue, or are just looking for a quick way to draw in the large audience of PHP users that are looking for validation in their choices.

prollyignored3• 13 years ago

For all the hate given to PHP, I still can't understand why the cool-elite-rockstar-ninja-sexy-hot-hackers of python/ruby/java/go/haskell/clojure/S*t can't come up with half-as-dumb replacement for mod_php and compete with it on its own terms.

Good variable names and documentation are infinitely more important than new shitty frameworks or do vs "{" vs "\t".

runnr_az• 13 years ago

I really like the Javascript Weekly / HTML5 Weekly newsletters... since I'm (theoretically, anyway) a PHP dev, this will be a nice addition.

JoeKM• 13 years ago

Thank you for this.

I'm not fond of PHP, but I don't know it as well as Ruby and Python. Still, I like to read about new technologies concerning PHP. I use HN to discover new stuff, but HN is a poor resource concerning PHP. HN has tremendous vocal disdain for PHP. Every PHP thread transforms into "Why I like or dislike PHP" instead of actual discussion regarding new technologies or libraries. What's worse is the debates feel like I've warped 10 years past because there is nothing ever new to them. People complain about the old things of PHP and never talk about the new things.

Put simply, even though I don't know PHP that well I feel like maybe it has potential and can actually do good in the right hands, but HN brainwashes you into thinking PHP is the worst.

PommeDeTerre• 13 years ago

Professional software developers who care about creating secure and maintainable applications that perform well will, by necessity, be very hesitant to use or recommend the use of PHP.

It has a very poor track record when it comes to security flaws, for example. It is also rife with inconsistencies and unjustifiable oddities throughout the language itself, and its standard library. Factors like those then promote the development of software that is of an unacceptable quality.

There do happen to be many extremely experienced software developers here at HN, and we won't hesitate to point out the flaws with various technologies, including PHP. This is not a bad thing; it's quite good. It's extremely important to be vocal about low-quality technologies.

These days, there are just so many alternatives that are far superior to PHP in every respect. Even with its new features, PHP is still not an acceptable option. So we shouldn't be looking for positives where there just aren't any, nor should we be surprised when all we find are negatives.

maratd• 13 years ago

> Professional software developers who care about creating secure and maintainable applications that perform well will, by necessity, be very hesitant to use or recommend the use of PHP.

Nonsense. As the most widely deployed platform it has absolutely massive exposure and security flaws are fixed quickly.

Don't confuse poor practices by newbies with platform security and stability.

> It has a very poor track record when it comes to security flaws, for example.

It does not.

> It is also rife with inconsistencies and unjustifiable oddities throughout the language itself

Every language has its warts. What's your point?

> These days, there are just so many alternatives that are far superior to PHP in every respect.

Yeah. Don't blame the tool. Blame the craftsman. And a craftsman who spends quite a bit of time complaining about the tools others use ... well ... you can fill in the rest.

gee_totes• 13 years ago

Since you seem to be taking suggestions, could you add "overflow:hidden;" to the main div (#home)?

On Firefox 3 the site appears about 4000 pixels wide.

inovica6• 13 years ago

Will do! Thanks for this

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