On one of my client’s sites they have the regular social sharing icons. When a visitor clicks on the share to facebook link it populates that share with some default info, and very importantly the image. This is important to them because they run image voting sites. I was asked to see if I could fathom why the image was missing on facebook sharing. The first thing I checked was the open graph (OG) tags on the site. The…
What are PHP traits? In genetics, traits refer to a characteristic or an attribute in your DNA. For instance, you have a trait for eye colour, or hair type. In PHP traits refer to a set of common functions which can be used by multiple classes. I think of it almost as “includes for classes” (don’t quote me on that, its just a conceptual way of looking at it). As with most programming languages, PHP is easiest learned by example,…
Dependency injection is a design pattern which allows you to inject your dependencies into a class, rather than have them loaded from within that class. This blog post on PHP dependency injection will be an example based post without too much commentary from me. Typically when we write our classes they require functionality from other classes. One way of achieving this is to include and load a new instance of the dependency within our class. Another possibility is that…
Zend Opcache in PHP improves your page speed by compiling code into machine code and storing the byte code in RAM. With each subsequent hit to a resource code is served from memory rather than being compiled again. PHP is an interpreted language. What this means is that unlike languages like C / C++, PHP is not compiled once to machine code and then executed from the binary each time. With PHP, each time a page is viewed on your…
If you’ve been doing PHP development for more than a week you’ll have heard about the benefits of message queues. If you’re totally new to this world and have not heard of queues you should google for more info. At its most basic though a message queue allows your application to offload long running tasks to be completed as background tasks, thus speeding up the front end for your visitors. For instance, on CuteBaby.co.za when a user registers their little…
During work on Cutify Media Marketing’s new WordPress competition sites I encountered a problem with WordPress image uploads. The following code was called to attach an uploaded image to a WordPress post and set it as the WordPress featured image, or post thumbnail as its called in the code.. The problem is that the code kept failing. We checked the logging of is_wp_error and found the following error: Our site uses SSL (https://), however on the server itself we use a…
There are often times when your data has a “belongsToMany” relationship. Laravel handles this relationship really beautifully! I learn best by example, so we’ll do this post as an example I’m currently working on. In our application we have multiple related websites. Each of these sites stands on its own with users being able to register individually on each site. We wanted to update this so that when a user registers on one site their details are automatically pushed to…
The problem I recently did a site for a client in wordpress which required a custom user type. These users needed to be able to use the media library but only to see their own media files. One would have thought that this is actually quite a common scenario so I thought that implementing it would be simple enough… In my research I came across a wordpress plugin called “View own posts media only”. This apparently worked well for a…
Having installed Laravel you’ll now want to create your first Laravel website. Creating the new Laravel site In the command line navigate to the parent directory which contains all your web projects. On my Ubuntu system my projects are all in /var/www/html, so on the command line: cd /var/www/html Decide on a name for your project. We’ll call ours my-cool-website. Now run the new command from the command line like this: laravel new my-cool-website …
To manage your js and css files in Laravel you could place your js and css files in the public directory, but using the /resources/assets folder you can add your js and css (sass or less, etc) in there. You then need to compile these with nodejs and NPM. To install nodejs / npm on Ubuntu you can use sudo apt-get install nodejs Once installed in a terminal window navigate to your Laravel project directory and type: node install Once…