best practices

Working With PHP Arrays in the Right Way

“Working With PHP Arrays in the Right Way” is a collection of tips and tricks on the array functions in PHP. PHP is weird, to say the least, when it comes to arrays, compared to many other programming languages, so articles like that are useful for pointers to better ways of doing things.

I think that even experienced PHP developers will find a bit or two that they either didn’t know or forgot about.

Unit Testing – The Big Picture

“Unit Testing – The Big Picture” is a super useful for those of us who need a refresher or an overview of what software testing is in general, and how unit testing relates to other types of testing in particular. It covers a bit of history of testing, different approaches, terminology, and more.

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) Prevention Cheat Sheet

“Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) Prevention Cheat Sheet” is a list of general recommendations and specific techniques to protect web applications against the CSRF attacks. That is, before the CSRF attacks will become obsolete.

Code quality tools in PHP to check and improve your code

“Code quality tools in PHP to check and improve your code” is a list of both some very well known tools and some new kids on the block. The article covers the following:

PHP-CS-Fixer
- Documentation
- Github
PHPCS
- Documentation
- Github
PHPMD
- Documenation
- Official website
PHPStan
- Github
PHPUnit
- Documentation
- Github
PHPLoc
- Github
PHPCPD
- Github
PHPMND
- Documentation
- Github
churn-php
- Github
dePHPend
- Official website
- Github
PhpCodeFixer
- Documentation
- Github
PhpMetrics
- Official website
- Github

PHP Static Analysis

Here are a couple of new tools in addition to previously mentioned PHPStan:

Psalm by Vimeo. The cool thing about this static analyzer is that it supports both PHP 5.6 and PHP 7, unlike PHPStan which requires PHP 7. (Yeah, I know PHP 5.6 has reached the end of its active support a while back, but there are still quite a few projects around using it.) Additionally, Psalm is easy to control via the XML configuration file, much like PHPUnit and PHP CodeSniffer.
Phan. This one is a bit trickier to install, as it requires some PHP extensions that I’ve never heard about (like PHP AST).