PHP

Fat controllers and models: an inevitable problem for most large-scale projects based on MVC frameworks such as Yii and Laravel. Fortunately, there’s a cure, and it’s in architecting a layered structure.

Many popular languages for web development have their ‘default’ framework, such as Ruby on Rails for Ruby, or Django for Python. However, PHP has no such single default and has multiple popular options to choose from.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Developer Karim Sakhibgareev compares the two most popular PHP frameworks, Symfony and Laravel, explores their features, and establishes guidelines for how PHP developers should choose between them.

It’s every developer’s dream to be more efficient. In this article, you’ll learn how one engineer saved himself from typing more than 20,000 characters over six months and prevented 1,000 bugs in the process.

Making your website or web app available to a wider audience often requires it to be available in multiple languages. For non-English projects, you can increase your audience by releasing it in English as well as your native language. Internationalizing and localizing your project, however, becomes a much easier process if you start during its infancy.

In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Igor Gomes dos Santos shows us how to leverage simple tools, like Gettext and Poedit, to internationalize and localize a PHP project.

WordPress plugins can be both a blessing and a curse. With more than 45,000 plugins available in its official repository, WordPress users can customize their website to their heart’s content. However, not all plugins follow the standards necessary to keep the platform performant and secure while also delivering a solid user experience.

In this tutorial, Toptal Software Engineer Ratko Solaja shows us how to build a robust WordPress plugin, following all the necessary best practices.

Would you like to test your PHP code like a boss? Do you feel that basic unit tests and PHPUnit just don’t cut it anymore? If your answer to both questions is yes, you might want to try Codeception, a mature and well-documented testing framework designed to outperform PHPUnit and Behat.

In this post, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Vasily Koval describes how he came to take the plunge and start using Codeception, and he explains why you should check out Codeception for your PHP testing needs.

When dealing with time consuming, resource intensive tasks, most PHP developers are tempted to choose the “quick hack route”. We’ve all used “ini_set(‘max_execution_time’, HUGE_INT);” before, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

In today’s tutorial, PHP developer Daniel Gheorghe demonstrates how an application’s user experience may be improved by separating long-running tasks from the main request flow using Laravel.

If you haven’t been working with PHP lately, you might wonder what happened to PHP 6. Why the skip from PHP 5 to PHP 7? Well, long story short, PHP 6 was a failure. To avoid confusion, the new version was renamed PHP 7.

PHP 7 introduces a number of new features, while at the same time dropping depreciated SAPIs and extensions. As a result, it tends to outperform PHP 5.x by a wide margin. Some compatibility issues could pose a problem, but most developers have nothing to worry about.

In this post, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Vilson Duka explains what makes PHP 7 different, and why it’s time to make the switch.

The Dependency Injection Container in Symfony2 allows components to be injected with their dependencies, and is often used as a Service Locator, which when combined with the DI-container pattern is considered to be an anti-pattern by many.

In this article, Toptal engineer Vasilii Lapin shows us how you can build a simple Symfony2 application using the DI-container, but without implementing the Service Locator pattern.