Thinking About Trac Replacements? Consider Mtrack.

Recently, I began working alongside Wez Furlong here at Message Systems. One of the many tools we use is Mtrack. This tool is a port of Trac into PHP, along with the addition of some great new features. Spearheaded by Wez, it’s a great tool that we use internally for our projects, and since it’s stable, it’s worth mentioning to the world.

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In Defense of Development Practices

On Tuesday, Marco Tabini told us that we were doing it all wrong. He makes some fantastic points about software development overall, and about the state of our profession. This article’s point isn’t to be a rebuttal, but a corollary to what he had to say.

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Micro Optimizations That Don’t Matter

Last week I wrote about some optimizations you can apply to your code that will improve the performance of your site significantly. I also mentioned that regularly an article pops up talking about ways to shave time off your scripts, and I talked about how these articles mostly are bunk. Like this one.
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Five Cool PHP Array Functions

Time and time again, I come across code that contains a variety of array-handling functions that too often duplicate the work that the PHP core team has done to develop built-in array functions. Since the built-in functions are inherently faster, trying to reimplement them in PHP will inevitably be a performance problem.

Here are five of my favorite array functions, along with their signatures and what they do.
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How To Write A Function In PHP

PHP allows developers to write a variety of different styles of code: procedural, object-oriented, or simply scripts. This flexibility makes PHP easy to learn, and also means that new developers to PHP may not be programmers in other languages.
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To The New PHP Programmers…

Nearly five years ago I started writing PHP code for fun. I had a project that I was working on, and I needed some sort of a programming language that would do calculations for me, and hopefully make managing a website easier. So I wrote my first web application.

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