On the CloudWays blog author Saquib Rizwan has written up a post sharing some best practices with Yii2 applications, the third part in a series, to help you "turbocharge" your development using included features.

Yii is a popular PHP development framework that has managed to hold its own in the fierce world of PHP framework. In effect, Yii is still a popular development framework for all categories of PHP projects.

[...] Whichever PHP framework you opt for (I personally prefer Yii2), the success of the project depends entirely upon the quality of the code. In all instances, following the Yii development best practices ensures that your code is of the highest quality and that the overall project confirms to the quality specifications. The following Yii best practices are the result of the experiences of the Yii developers from all over the world.

Included in his list of recommendations are practices like:

• Follow the Code Standards
• Optimized Overheads for Yii
• (Avoiding) Cache Heavy Processes
• Profile and Test Applications

These and the other items in the list include a brief summary of the practice and, on some, links to other resources for more information or tools to help.

The BugSnag blog has a post by guest author Graham Campbell sharing some best practices when using Composer in your PHP applications. It's written mainly for those that haven't used Composer much yet and want to get started quickly and easily.

Composer has made big waves in the PHP community in recent years. Thanks to Composer’s creators, Jordi Boggiano and Nils Adermann, Composer has become the absolute backbone of PHP’s package infrastructure today.

In this blog post, we shall be introducing Composer, from the ground up. We will see what packages are, how they should be versioned, and how to install them into your application. Learn about Composer and never look back!

He starts out by defining what a package is in the world of Composer and how it differs from a "library". He then briefly touches on the early days of the tool before showing how to get it installed and creating your first "composer.json" configuration file. He then gets into one of the more tricky subjects when dealing with Composer and packages - versioning. Finally he covers a few of his suggested best practices when using Composer including defining your own package installation constraints and how the autoloading works to your benefit.

In a recent post to his site Tim Cotten talks about how it's possible to screw up singletons in PHP. Singletons are a design pattern that returns the same object once it is created each time the method is called.

“Echo chambers” are an oft-encountered downfall of developers when learning new skills or implementing unfamiliar systems. What begins as a simple question leads to a collection of up-voted knowledge perfectly ready to be copied into your project?—?a great thing for productivity (if you don’t mind getting it wrong).

[...] With that example of echo chambers in mind let’s follow the path of a developer deciding to implement the Singleton pattern in PHP.

He goes through the mindset of a PHP developer wanting to use a singleton in their application, finding an example on the web for their need (making a PDO instance). He gives a sample implementation based on the web examples and tries to execute a test script....with a less than helpful error message. He points out that he's not picking on the source of the example itself, but using it as an example of the "echo chamber" idea perpetuating an example without understanding the logic.

He continues along this same path of thinking with an example from another source - StackOverflow. He cites a specific example, points out the issue and the code it contains. He ends the post with some helpful suggestions on how to "break" this echo chamber and improve the resources in various places on the web.

The Loosely Coupled podcast, hosted by PHP community members Jeff Carouth and Matt Frost, has posted their latest episode - Episode 18: Best Practices. In it they talk about "best practices" as it relates to teams and working with other developers.

In this episode Jeff and Matt will talk about their experiences of getting teams moving on good practices. They will cover times when it has been challenging to convince higher-ups the value of doing certain things, all the way to how to go about changing teams by example. This episode is sponsored by our friend, Coderabbi, who is currently on the Wisdom as a Service World Tour 2015.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3. If you enjoy the show, be sure to check out previous episodes and subscribe to their feed.

On the AirPair site today they've posted an article from developer Brian Fenton covering several things he sees as the best practices for modern PHP development, a listing of several tool, practices and suggestions to improve your skills as a PHP developer and bring them to the next level.

He breaks it down into five main sections (each with their own subsections):

• Setup and configuration
• Use Composer
• Follow good design principles
• Object calisthenics
• Unit testing

Some of the points made under each of these sections include suggestions about using sensible defaults, installing and using Composer, the SOLID design principles and unit testing tools. Check out the full post for more great suggestions and techniques to improve your skills.

That Podcast has released the latest episode of their podcast - Episode #10: The one with the best practices.

Beau and Dave catch up on just about everything, before discussing the recent preview of the Official Symfony Best Practices document.

Lots of different topics are mentioned in this episode including:

• Full Stack Radio
• Bootstrapped.fm
• Bringing Sculpin to Life
• Bower vs BowerPHP
• PHPUnit Prophecy integration
• Repobox.io on Reddit
• No Capes

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3.

Matthias Noback has a new post today with some of his thoughts about the recently released Symfony Best Practices book and some "unnecessary contrapositions" and things he sees that could help improve the perception of the book and the advice it provides.

Of course I'm going to write something about the new Symfony Best Practices book that was written by Fabien Potencier, Ryan Weaver and Javier Eguiluz. It got a lot of negative responses, at least in my Twitter feed, and I think it's a good idea to read Richard Miller's post for some suggestions on how to deal with an "early preview release" like this and how we can be a bit more positive about it.

He emphasizes the "staying positive" aspect of his message and points out that while some of the suggestions are good, they may not be the "best" in all circumstances. His main point, though, is that he thinks the way the book was introduced (the wording of the post) was unfortunate and cast a more negative light on the work done previously around Symfony best practices and advice. He recommends changing things around a bit in both the messaging and the book itself to take the focus away from the "you're doing it wrong" and encourage people to do it the way they recommend, casting a more positive spin on it all.

On the Symfony blog today they've officially announced the Symfony Best Practices initiative that's being ramped up to help provide a solid resource for Symfony developers and guide them towards more correct development within the framework (and its components).

Since the publication of Symfony 2.0, the Symfony Community has created an unofficial set of recommendations for developing Symfony2 applications. Unfortunately, a lot of these recommendations are in fact wrong. They unnecessarily overcomplicate things and don't follow the original pragmatic philosophy of Symfony.

This guide, soon to be published at http://symfony.com/best-practices will share 31 of the best practices gathered by Fabien Potencier, Ryan Weaver and Javier Eguiluz from their own experience and the practices the community has found along the way. The things in this guide will be optional, not required, to make Symfony-based applications work, so don't worry if you're not following them exactly.

The Sound of Symfony podcast has released their latest episode (#4) today focusing on Best Practices. Join hosts Magnus Nordlander and Tobias Nyholm and guest Kris Wallsmith ask they talk about some good practices to follow in Symfony-based applications.

In this episode we talk to Kris Wallsmith about best practices for your Symfony app. If you've ever wondered which code belongs in your controller, how to write your model, or how to separate your code into bundles, this is the segment for you. It also features the return of Magnus' favorite segment, the hidden gems section, and a discussion on news and a rundown of community updates.

Other topics mentioned include the walking trip to SymfonyCon, a few "hidden gems" and community updates about Symfony Live London 2014 and Symfony Live New York 2014. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 for listening offline. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed for more great content.

NetTuts.com has published a few more WordPress tips and best practices to help you get the most out of your WordPress-based application.

Welcome to the second part of the series. In the first article, we explained the WordPress Coding Standards, how to avoid namespaces collisions, comments in the code, and some basic security tips. Today, we are going to go a bit deeper and write some more code and learn some techniques to improve performance and security of our plugins.

They look specifically at when you should include your scripts and styles, formatting Ajax calls and working with filters and actions. Code snippets are included with each point with links to some other resources for some of the topics to provide more information.