On the Laravel News site there's a post sharing a helpful package that can provide an audit trail for model changes, helping you automatically keep track of what changed when.

Laravel Auditing is a Laravel package that aims to make it easy to track eloquent model changes. The documentation describes Laravel Auditing as follows:

"This package will help you understand changes in your Eloquent models, by providing information about possible discrepancies and anomalies that could indicate business concerns or suspect activities.

Laravel Auditing allows you to keep a history of model changes by simply using a trait. Retrieving the audited data is straightforward, making it possible to display it in various ways."

The post talks about another use case for the package - handling versioning for records (like auto-saving a blog post periodically). An example is included showing how to implement the package on the model, show an audit history and a Blade view to show the results.

The ReadOrListen podcast has posted their latest episode featuring the reading of a new article by Jesse Schutt about using Laravel Audit to evaluate the current state of a Laravel-based codebase (read by Jack Fruh).

Recently the Zaengle team was asked to look over an existing Laravel application and give a review of the overall state of the code. We were to act as an independent third party, between a new studio who had inherited the codebase, and the client, who was anticipating launching the product.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 of the show directly. You can also subscribe to their feed or follow them on Twitter/Facebook to get more information about new episodes as they're released.

Adam Culp, well-known PHP community member and organizer of both the Sunshine PHP conference and ZendCon, has started up a new podcast that's targeted at blending the two things he enjoys most - geeky "stuff" and running.

My plans behind the podcast is to bring together two things I love to do…programming, and running. It only makes sense that I would want to share in both areas, and a podcast is a great way to do that. With the resurgence of podcasts lately I felt a little bit of peer pressure to attempt my own, and so far I have received wonderful reviews from PHP developers who also run, or runners who are also programmers.

You can find out more about the show over on rungeekradio.com or just tune in to the first episode and see what you think. This first show deals with conferences, user group talks and performance audit tools. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to the feed to get more episodes as they're released.

In this post to his site, Justin Carmony shares some of his experience in working with a legacy code base and shares some of the steps he's taking in his own work to modernize it.

There is [still] one big piece written in a less than ideal system. Its still PHP, but much more hacked together. It is our backend CMS system for controlling the website. It is painful to use, and we get many complaints all the time about it. [...] on Twitter, I saw a link for a talk Paul M. Jones gave at the Nashville PHP Usergroup. It was entitled: “It Was Like That When I Got Here: Steps Toward Modernizing a Legacy Codebase.” I couldn’t think of a better title for that talk, nor a better talk to listen to at this very moment.

He mentions the steps he taking to further advance his own project towards a better, non-legacy state including an audit of the current functionality and getting input from users as to which features give them the most pain.

Using these lists to decide what to refactor, we can get the biggest gains for the least amount of work. If we were to rebuild, we would get the smallest gains (if any) of barely having something functional with the greatest effort.

Fabien Potencier (of the Symfony framework project) has posted the results of a security audit that was performed on the framework by SektionEins.

The Symfony2 core team takes security issues very seriously; we have a dedicated procedure to report such issues, and the framework itself tries to give the developer all the features needed to secure his code easily. Thanks to our successful community donation drive, SektionEins performed a security audit on the Symfony2 code earlier this year. The audit is now over and the good news is that the Symfony2 code is pretty solid; only minor problems have been found. They have all been addressed now

Their findings included things like the Request component trusting certain headers, bad regex validation on datetimes, password encoding issues, cookie handling and exception handling issues. Links to the fixes for each are included in the post.

DevShed has posted a new tutorial today looking at one of the more useful tools a developer can add into an application - logging.

If there is no logging mechanism, then if there's a goof-up in a production environment, you have absolutely no idea what went wrong. The only thing which a support developer can do in this case is to reproduce the issue at the developer end, which sometimes work and sometimes don't.

The look at the types of logging (trace logs, audit logs and user logging/history) and create a simple class that allows flexibility for file location, priority and timstamping. Their script contains a writelog method that does all the work (including pushing it through the PEAR logging class).

In a continuing effort to share his PHP security knowledge with the community, Chris Shiflett has launched a new means of communication - Brain Bulb Webcasts.

I've been playing around with Snapz Pro lately. I originally intended to use it to help spice up some of my talks by offering prepared demos directly in Keynote, but I have also decided that it would be useful to offer various talks and demos to the PHP community.

The first Brain Bulb Webcast is PHP Security Audit HOWTO, a short video of one of my conference talk.

The webcast plays in QuickTime and lasts about 20 minutes with lots of good tips along the way.

In a continuing effort to share his PHP security knowledge with the community, Chris Shiflett has launched a new means of communication - Brain Bulb Webcasts.

I've been playing around with Snapz Pro lately. I originally intended to use it to help spice up some of my talks by offering prepared demos directly in Keynote, but I have also decided that it would be useful to offer various talks and demos to the PHP community.

The first Brain Bulb Webcast is PHP Security Audit HOWTO, a short video of one of my conference talk.

The webcast plays in QuickTime and lasts about 20 minutes with lots of good tips along the way.

The latest PHPLife from Richard Davey has been posted.

In this weeks tagged: comic PHPLife.org life audit comic PHPLife.org life audit

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