PHP

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.

Today, WordPress covers more than 50 percent of website shares and serves nearly 60 million websites worldwide. Its popularity has resulted in many misconceptions that have grown and spread like a forest fire, and have made people stay away from WordPress. In this post, Toptal Software Engineer Donald Mudenge explains the five most common WordPress taboos and myths, clarifies them, and offers solutions on how to overcome them.

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.

WordPress, one of the most popular publishing platforms, has stood the test of time and now powers a significant portion of the web. Sadly, its reputation is plagued by claims of poor performance and complexity with scaling. However, the root causes of such performance issues are often bad code and poorly implemented plugins and themes. In this post, Toptal Software Engineer Martín Di Felice shares tips and tricks for WordPress developers who want to build better plugins and themes and destroy the notion that WordPress is a slow platform.

You've heard that Magento is the eCommerce platform to use if you're serious about your business -- and you're serious about your business -- so you've decided on Magento. But do you know what you're getting into? In this post, Toptal Software Engineer Andrew Hughes walks us through the difference between WordPress WooCommerce and Magento. While Magento is the expert’s eCommerce platform of choice, it’s not always the right solution, depending on your client.

WordPress is easily the most powerful open-source blogging and content management system available online today. As WordPress is easy enough to set up and has a user-friendly approach, many developers are often underestimating it and so make mistakes in development. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Andrew Schultz outlines the 10 most common mistakes that WordPress developers should be aware of for future projects.

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.