Fresh Resources for Web Designers and Developers (June 2020)

PHP turns 25 this month, and the alpha-stage of PHP 8 will be released this year. PHP was once developed as merely a tool to create a “Personal Home Page” and its developer never intended it to be a programming language. But today PHP is a full-fledged programming language that powers more than half of the websites, services, tools, and servers on the planet.

To celebrate its birthday, in this round of the series, we put together various PHP resources. From WordPress plugins, an MVC framework, tool to run automate testing with a browser to a couple of references to create PHP extensions. Let’s get started.

Analog

A PHP library that makes it easy for you to write a log for error, warning, or debugging. It provides lots of options to put the log i.e. on a log file, throw it to stderr so you can view it in the Terminal, to a database like MySQL and MongoDB, send it to email, or to a third-party service like Slack.

phpRedisAdmin

phpRedisAdmin a dashboard UI where you can conveniently manage database similar to phpMyAdmin. But it’s of managing MySQL database and manages Redis, an in-memory data structure that can be used as a database or for caching.

Ignition

Error stacks don’t have to be boring. If you run your website or application with Laravel, you can install this Iginition package. It’ll instantly make the error page look a lot nicer. Just look at the screenshot 👀.

Puphpeteer

Puphpeteer is a PHP library that allows you to write commands to orchestrate Puppeteer with PHP syntax. Puppeteer is a Headless Chrome Node.js API that among other things can be used to run automatic testing in a browser. It is usually orchestrated with an NPM module and JavaScript.

So, if your website and application is built with PHP and you’re more convenient working with PHP, this library will save you the day.

Shopware Platform

An e-commerce platform built around modern stack of Symfony and Vue.js with a focus on the API first. This allows it to integrate easily with third-party platforms like payment gateway, ERP, or creating a custom module.

Hestia

A PHP framework to build a web server control panel for Ubuntu and Debian. If you’re looking for an easy way to manage hosting or server for your clients. This is probably the framework you’ve been looking for.

WP CLI Valet Command

A simple WP CLI module that allows you to spin up localhost for WordPress using Laravel Valet. And since it’s dependant on Laravel Valet, this module will only work in macOS, unfortunately.

WP Sentry

A WordPress plugin to easily integrate your WordPress site to Sentry.io – a SaaS to log error across different platforms. It enables you to log both your PHP and JavaScript errors, providing a comprehensive error tracing and allowing you to fix errors more efficiently.

Mail Eclipse

An application for your Laravel website and app that allows you to edit email template with a nice GUI. It supports creating text template and HTML template.

LaRecipe

A PHP library for your Laravel website and application. It’s packed with features for professional and organized documentation; it supports Markdown syntax, UI is built on top of Vue.js, and search is powered by Algolia so it results in blazing fast and relevant results.

Fjord

A PHP library to create a content dashboard. It’s fully customizable and allows you to add any field on to the dashboard like basic text input, text area, date and time field, WYSIWYG editor, or create custom UI component using Vue.js.

Learn ReactPHP

It’s a free video course to learn ReactPHP from Marcel Pociot and Beyond Code. ReactPHP is a PHP library that aims to make it easier to run Aysnchronous PHP application. With ReactPHP you can create an application like CLI, virtual web server, daemon, etc.

PHP Internals

PHP INternals Book contains the instructions to create a PHP extension written in C. If you’re interested in creating extension such as XDebug, Redis, etc. then take a look at this content.

Zephir

Zephir is a high-level programming language that makes it easy to create a PHP extension. Instead of dealing with C directly which could be cumbersome, Zephir language provides a more familiar syntax as it looks similar to PHP. The compiler will then convert the code down to C to compile it into a PHP extension.

Phalcon

Phalcon is a full-fledged MVC framework. But unlike Laravel and Symfony, Phalcon is installed as a PHP extension. It’s built using Zephir which compiled down to C. This why Phalcon runs so fast compared to other MVC framework.

PHP CPP

Another way for creating a PHP extension is by using C++ with this framework, PHP-CPP. It provides an abstraction in C++ that will also convert it down to C then to a PHP extension

Tall Stack

TALL stands for Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js, Laravel, and Livewire. It’s a stack of framework that boosts your productivity to build a functional and interactive application or website.

Psysh

This tool provides a debugger for PHP from the Shell / Terminal. It’s equipped with auto-completion, supports namespacing, and you can read documentation right from it. Psysh may be a better replacement for the native PHP interactive shell: php -a.

PHP 8 Features and Improvements

A comprehensive article that introduces improvements, new functions, and syntax in PHP 8. At the point of this writing, PHP 8 is just around the corner. Alpha release is scheduled this month and aiming final release in December this year (2020).

Codespace

Last but not least, Github has recently introduced a new feature called Codespace. It’s an editor that you can launch in Github and runs right in the browser. It works quite similar to Visual Studio Code where you can customize the editor and install the extension. This new feature is quite a breakthrough that may change the way we use a code editor.