On the TutsPlus.com site they've posted a tutorial showing you how to use a CRUD generator tool to automatically generate some of the create, read, update, and delete functionality for your application.

In this article, we’re going to review PDO CRUD - a form builder and database management tool. PDO CRUD helps you build forms for your database tables with just a few lines of code, making it quick and easy to bootstrap a database application.

[...] Today, we’re going to discuss the PDO CRUD tool, available at Code Canyon for purchase at a very reasonable price. It’s a complete CRUD builder tool which allows you to build applications by just providing database tables and by writing a few lines of code.

It works with multiple database back-ends, including MySQL, Postgres and SQLite. In this article, we’ll see how to use PDO CRUD to build a CRUD system with the MySQL database back-end.

They then walk you through the installation and configuration of the tool, defining options about the host, username, and password for the database. It then helps you create two tables that will be used as sources: employee and department. Once these are defined, you can then use the web frontend to perform CRUD operations on these tables without having to write any custom code. It also lists out some of the additional features including searching, pagination and bulk export.

The post goes on to talk about how to make modifications to how the system works with the data in the tables (like field types), creating join views and customizing the options for other tool features.

The SitePoint PHP Blog has a new tutorial posted from author Claudio Ribeiro that takes you beyond the basics with the Symfony Console component, showing you how to use some of the helpers and other tools included in its functionality.

It’s undeniable how useful console commands can be when developing software. Not too long ago we re-introduced the Symfony Console component.

This component allows us to create structured and testable CLI commands. We created some simple commands and tested them; but when our commands become bigger and more complex, we need a different set of tools.

This is what we are going to look at today: advanced Symfony console tools.

He then walks you through the installation of the component via Composer and the initial creation of a "FizzBuzz" console command class (and other related classes). He then shows how to use several of the helpers:

• the "question" helper to ask for user input
• the "table" helper for outputting structured data
• the "progress bar" helper to visually output progress of a task

There's also examples included showing how to call a command from inside a command and changing up color and style of the output.

The TutsPlus.com site has updated their "Building Your Startup" series with their latest tutorial showing you how to build advanced scheduling commands allowing for things like repeating meetings, updating the meeting details and rescheduling.

I also began to realize that the ability to adjust meetings easily after they've been scheduled could make or break the Meeting Planner brand. [...] In today's tutorial, I'll cover expanding the navigation bar using Bootstrap and the basics of building some of the advanced scheduling features within Meeting Planner. Next week, I'll review building the more complex feature for participants to request change(s) and for others to accept or decline them.

He starts with the frontend, updating the navigation bar to include links to other functionality for meeting changes, repeating and showing planning activities for the meeting. He uses Bootstrap's single-button dropdowns for this and includes the code to add them to the UI with a bit of code in the view. He then gets into the main functionality of these changes showing the code to:

• make changes to a current meeting
• reschedule a meeting
• repeat a meeting
• resend invitations

The next part in the series will take a look into social engineering and UX needs for the application along with some other smaller changes.

The Master Zend Framework site has posted a tutorial that seeks to help you get the most out of Composer on the command line with some essential tips beyond just he basics.

I know that a series on Composer might seem odd. But, as Composer’s been a part of PHP for so long now, I feel that it’s something which most of us take for granted. It’s revolutionised the PHP landscape, making it easier than ever before to build great software in PHP. But do we really know how to get the most out of it. For that reason, I’ve created this series, so that you level up your skills and really get the most from it.

In part one of this series, I’m going to take you through Composer’s command-line. I’ve cherry-picked a key subset of the command-line options, and focused in on key switches, so that you can do more than you already can.

He skips over the basic "require", "install" and "update" handling covered in many other tutorials and instead covers:

• project creation
• the "show" command to list installed packages
• "remove" to drop a package from the current dependencies
• using "depends" to see package dependencies
• finding outdates packages with (appropriately) the "outdated" command
• seeing suggested packages with "suggest"

For each item on the list there's an example of the command, what kind of options is allows and, for some, the output generated as a result.

In a new post from the Dotdev.co site there's a tutorial from Amo Chohan helping you write advanced search query filters for Eloquent in your Laravel application.

I recently needed to implement a search feature in an events management project I was building. What begun as a few simple options (searching by name, e-mail etc), turned into a pretty large set of parameters.

Today, I’ll go over the process I went through and how I built a flexible and scalable search system. For those of you who are eager to see the final code, head over to the Git repository to see the code.

He starts off by outlining what he'll be creating and where the need comes from for this more advanced filtering. He uses a company-wide calendar example with events and meetings/clients shown for all users. He defines the filters he knows he'll want to search by and the models relating to the data needed for those queries. He then spends the rest of the post going through the code needed to implement the filtering, starting with a rough (but working) version and refactoring from there. He moves away from the procedural method of applying filters to a query object directly and over to "applying" them more dynamically using a set of filter instances via a Decorator design pattern approach.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted from author Christopher Pitt continuing on his look at macros in PHP (part one is here). In this new tutorial he gets beyond the basic example he provided in part one and recreate some expressive syntax from Javascript and prefixing strings.

I was so excited about my previous article about PHP macros, that I thought it would be fun for us to explore the intersection of macros and functional programming. PHP is already full of functions, with object oriented patterns emerging relatively late in its life. Still, PHP’s functions can be cumbersome, especially when combined with variable scope rules…

[...] It’s not significantly more code [to append the prefix in PHP vs Javascript], but it isn’t as clear or idiomatic as the JavaScript alternative. I often miss JavaScript’s expressive, functional syntax, when I’m building PHP things. I want to try and win back some of that expressive syntax!

He starts with a quick install of the yay library used in the first part of the series. Instead of the manual prefixing from his first example, he creates a macro that uses the array_map handling to generate the necessary code once the pre-compiler has done its job. He then expands on this simpler solution and updates it to allow for the setting of the prefix string. It gets a little complex but he walks through each step of the way, explaining the code that's added and what it expands out to. The result is a map method that generates a bit of code that's eval-ed to handle the prefixing automatically.

On the SitePoint PHP blog Zach Wallace shares more database wisdom with his readers introducing three more JOINs you should know in your development work.

There are many ways to JOIN data from two database tables and filter the information you require. Craig Buckler wrote a popular piece on understanding JOINs; namely INNER, LEFT, RIGHT, and FULL OUTER. This article is an extension of that one.

He starts with the data he'll be working with: customers and books, linked by a book_id column. He then quickly reviews some of the joins already discussed in the previous article (LEFT, RIGHT, OUTER, INNER) before getting into the newer, more powerful types:

• LEFT JOIN with Exclusion
• RIGHT JOIN with Exclusion
• OUTER JOIN with Exclusions

He finishes the post with a few other thoughts about using WHERE clauses in JOINs, the CROSS JOIN and how the JOINs relate to each other in MySQL.

NetTuts.com has continued their series around programming with the Yii2 framework in this latest tutorial looking at the use of the Advanced Application Template, an enhanced boilerplate system that provides a bit more built-in functionality than the default application setup.

In this Programming With Yii2 series, I'm guiding readers in use of the Yii2 Framework for PHP. As you begin to use Yii for real development, you may want to start your next project with its Advanced Application Template. Among other things, it provides integrated user management features as well as two applications, one for the consumer-facing front end and the other, an administrative back end.

In this tutorial, I'll introduce you to the Yii2 Advanced Template and guide you through the basic setup and usage.

They start with a look at how the Advanced Template is different from the default one (a checklist) and how to set up a new project using it. They show how to configure the database connection and execute the required migration to build out the user table. They also walk you through the Apache setup for local development and what the resulting "Congratulations" page should look like. The remainder of the post explores the user management section, showing how to configure email delivery, signup, login and password reset requests.

The Paragon Initiative site has posted a new guide to helping you integrate libsodium into your application to provide additional cryptographic functionality in addition to things like mcrypt and crypt

You shouldn't need a Ph.D in Applied Cryptography to build a secure web application. Enter libsodium, which allows developers to develop fast, secure, and reliable applications without needing to know what a stream cipher even is.

After reading this brief electronic manual, you should know what libsodium is, what features it has, and how to install it (both the library and the PHP extension from PECL). [You should also] generally understand which cryptography tool to use for a specific scenario [and] be capable of writing production-quality code that uses libsodium.

The guide (still a work in progress) starts by explaining what libsodium is and what it has to offer over other encryption methods. It talks about the role of random data in encryption, a few basic crypto concepts (like key-based encryption and hashing) and finally gets into some of the more advanced features of the libsodium extension.

Additionally, the guide is also open source so if you'd like to contribute, just submit a pull request for consideration.

On the Coding.bmail.net blog they've posted a guide to what they've called an advanced logging system in PHP for careful developers - essentially a logging system that's as "error proof" as possible and that works with as little user exposure as possible.

Being aware of all the activity and problems under the hood is essential when running big websites with lots of users, many features and, as it is usual in such cases, weak spots that must not be left untracked.

In order to be the first in knowing when errors or other events of interest happen we need a well designed logs manager. My code will provide such a feature, for PHP based websites.

They briefly outline how the complete setup will work, failing back to email if the database connection isn' available and logging based on environment. It also includes error levels and, on development only, a method for showing the errors being logged. While a good bit of this functionality could be handled by something like Monolog they do include some additional features like the email fallback, output of the errors in development mode and custom error/exception handlers.