Lots of people have the itch to write their own frameworks. They think that they can do better than Zend, Cake, Symfony, or application-level frameworks like Drupal. They’re convinced that those designers and developers made fatal flaws, and they can improve upon them. They’re just itching to give it a shot.
So for those of you [...]

Last week, I did a talk at the Frederick Web meetup about tips and tricks for improving your object-oriented code. A lot of these tips were adapted from a fabulous presentation by Stefan Priebsch but the ideas are by no means original to him, and they’re exceptionally good ideas when you’re talking about object-oriented code. [...]

With the introduction of PHP 5, the PHP Data Object was introduced as core functionality. PHP 5.1 turned on a minimum level of support for SQLite, by default, and PDO supports most of the major database engines. PDO offers a number of enhancements and improvements over the various database libraries (e.g. mysql_*, mysqli_*, pg_*), the [...]

This entry is part of an ongoing series involving the review of a code sample and it’s refactoring. For the original code sample, see here.
The topics discussed in this entry may be fairly advanced. Please feel free to ask questions, and discuss best practices.
If you’ve been following this series from the beginning, take a moment [...]

One of the decisions that has to be made each time an application is written for distribution is how best to set up the configuration files. There are a number of different approaches taken to this: some opt to use the define() function and define constants, while others use large arrays. The purpose of this [...]