Christopher Pitt has kicked off a new series of posts to his site covering the creation of a new blog system. It's not just any blogging system, however. In this system he's developing it as an asynchronous application using preprocessing. In the introduction to the project he fills in more of the details:

I’ve been building this blog, for a few days now, and it’s been a fun experience. This is partly because it’s an asynchronous application, and partly because it uses a lot of preprocessing.

I thought it would be interesting for me to describe how it is put together, in an ad-hoc sort of series. In the series, I’ll show bits of code and links to libraries I’ve used. I’ll talk about why I’ve chosen to do things in certain ways, and what I could improve (short of deleting everything and starting over with a mature framework).

In this first part of the series, he includes a "tiny bit of code" showing a component of the system before the preprocessing has been run. He's also posted the second part of the series that continues covering the functionality for handling "posts" in more depth (including the use of flat files for content storage and functionality to output Markdown content as HTML).

On the Symfony blog they've posted about an additional update they've made to bring more information to the community: an Events section.

Following the new features we've added in May in the Events & Meetups section, we're pleased to introduce a brand new section within the main website menu: Symfony Events. This will enable you to find a Symfony event near you more easily.

[...] The Events section itself has also been improved, again! We've added a map where you can see at a glance where are organized all the upcoming Symfony events. You can find on the map: all the upcoming official Symfony conferences pinned in red and all the upcoming Symfony community events pinned in blue.

They also added a feature that will automatically pull in Symfony events from the Meetup.com site so there's no need to list them in both places.

On the SitePoint PHP blog they've kicked off a series by Zoran Antolovic walking through the creation of a blog application using the latest from the Symfony project - Symfony Flex.

Our journey towards a stable, robust, high-performance web app will start with the simple but functional application — the so-called minimum viable product (MVP). We’ll populate the database with random content, do some benchmarks and improve performance incrementally. Every article in this series will be a checkpoint on our journey!

This article will cover the basics of setting up the project and organizing files for our Symfony Flex project. I’ll also show you some tips, tricks and helper scripts I’m using for speeding up the development.

So far they've posted the first two articles of the series:

• Part one explaining some of the basics of Flex and getting the application set up (including some sample fixture data)
• Part two showing how to populate the application with more realistic data, run some basic performance tests and create a first unit test

There's much more to come in the series including the creation of file (image) upload handling, user registration and login and the creation of image galleries from uploads.

The Auth0 blog has posted the third part of their "Building a Blog" series of tutorials showing the use of their authentication technologies coupled with a Symfony framework backend. In this latest article author Greg Holmes shows how to deploy the application created in parts one and two to Heroku.

Symfony is a PHP framework as well as a set of reusable PHP components and libraries. It uses the Model-View-Controller design pattern and can be scaled to be used in any requirement. It aims to speed up the creation and maintenance of web applications, replacing repetitive code. In this part of the series, you will learn how to deploy the blog engine that you have created in the previous parts on Heroku. The final code can be found at this repository.

He starts with a bit of catching up, briefly covering the contents of the first two articles before getting into the main content of this third. He covers some of the basics of Heroku and Travis-CI before getting into the actual deployment flow. He then helps you set up a GitHub account (used as a source for the deployment), set up a local MySQL database for testing and the installation of a few required dependencies. Next is the installation of the Heroku and Travis-CI command line tools, the configuration for each and some basic setup steps for each service.

Finally, he gets back to the Symfony application, setting up a few additional options in the Composer configuration to create a few commands. These commands are then executed as a part of the deployment process. There's also changes to the Symfony configuration files to reference the environment rather than a local path in several locations. The post ends with the setup instructions on the Auth0 side to allow handling to work from the newly deployed Heroku instance.

On the QuickerWP blog there's a new post with some recommendations of plugins and techniques you can use to make your WordPress blog "fly" (increase the overall performance).

WordPress sites are notorious for their poor loading times. The platform itself comes with very few optimizations, and once you start adding plugins, things will only go south from there. [...] Most of the performance penalties actually come from having too many plugins installed, a poorly optimized site configuration, and a theme that does not optimize loading speeds (most of them don’t).

[...] It’s rare to see high marks [on Yellow Lab Tools] (a B or A result), but after applying the tweaks listed here, we’ve managed to get our own site to score an A (92/100) result, and surprisingly low loading times. Try it on your site to see how you fare.

They have a list of seven recommendations:

• Autoptimize plugin
• WP Fastest Cache plugin
• PurifyCSS
• TinyPNG plugin
• Guetzli (for image optimization)
• CSS Sprites
• QuickerWP

Each item in the list comes with a brief description of the enhancement it brings to the table and links to find out more information.

The TutsPlus.com site has posted the third part of their "Dynamic Page Templates in WordPress" tutorial series today. In this latest article author David Gwyer finishes off the series using all that they've shared from part one and part two to create two examples.

In the first two parts of this tutorial series, we covered what dynamic page templates were and why they were needed. We also looked at the code required to implement them.

In this third and final tutorial in the series, I'll be creating two examples of fully working dynamic page templates you can use in your own projects. These were specifically chosen to be easily extendable to suit your own needs, and are intended as inspiration for any other type of dynamic page templates you can think of.

He then walks you through the creation of the two page templates: a Simple Contact Form and a Blog Post Archive. The first allows you to dynamically control the form elements for a UI interface (rather than code) and the second uses dynamic data to display the list of previous blog posts. The tutorial then finishes with a look at how, since WordPress 4.7, you can use dynamic page templates with any kind of post, not just pages.

On the Scotch.io site a new tutorial has been posted showing you how to use the Laravel-permission package (from Spatie) to more easily handle permission setup and validation in a Laravel application.

When building an application, we often need to set up an access control list (ACL). An ACL specifies the level of permission granted to a user of an application. For example a user John may have the permission to read and write to a resource while another user Smith may have the permission only to read the resource.

In this tutorial, I will teach you how to add access control to a Laravel app using Laravel-permission package. For this tutorial we will build a simple blog application where users can be assigned different levels of permission.

The tutorial then walks though the installation of the package and some of the new tables it adds to the database when you run the included migrations. It then talks about some of the methods that can be used, both on the backend and in Blade templates, to evaluate if the current user has the roles required. Next up is the creation of the controllers to handle the basic CRUD tasks and working with the blog posts and views to set up the permissions and roles. Finally the tutorial shows the code required to evaluate the roles and permissions of the user and an example of middleware that performs a pre-check to see if a user even has access to manage various pieces of the application.

Stoyan Stefanov has written up a post sharing the process he followed to migrate a WordPress blog to HTTPS on the Dreamhost hosting service.

Now some folks reminded me recently that the Perf calendar was not yet migrated to HTTPS... True enough. I have to do it. Eventually. In any normal situation I'll procrastinate indefinitely, but since I had more pressing things to do and "Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment"... I bit the bullet.

Below are the steps that worked for me with a WordPress blog, hosted on DreamHost. The steps are still relevant to any WordPress site, just using Dreamhost as an example and since Dreamhost makes many of the steps easy.

He breaks the process down into six parts, including a bit of testing at the end:

• Setup free SSL certificate thanks to Let's Encrypt
• Backup all the things (or just the blog's database or just the table with the posts)
• Search and replace internal references (images and links) WP settings
• Redirect http to https permanently in .htaccess
• Test/tweak?

Each step comes with the code or configuration you'll need to set up HTTPS and some screenshots where necessary, like with the Let's Encrypt setup.

On the Toptal.com site author Donald Mudenge has written up a post that wants to help debunk the top 5 WordPress myths that are still floating around about this popular and common tool.

In the early days, people used WordPress only as a blogging tool. However, today WordPress covers more than 50 percent of the market share for CMSs, supporting nearly 60 million websites worldwide.

As a commonly used platform for building websites and other online applications, misconceptions have spread like a forest fire, keeping people away from WordPress. In this article, I outline and explain the five most common WordPress taboos and myths, clarify them and offer solutions on how to overcome them.

The five myths he tries to dispel are:

• WordPress is significantly more likely to be hacked.
• WordPress is just blogging software.
• WordPress professionals are designers.
• WordPress isn’t an enterprise solution.
• One WordPress requires one database.

For each item on the list he includes a brief summary of what's usually said about the myth and corrects it with his own description and links to other resources helping to prove his point.

On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new post from editor Bruno Skvorc sharing his list of top 8 plugins for Grav he sees as "must haves". Grav is a flat-file based content management system that uses modern PHP practices such as Composer packages, Makdown for content and YAML for configuration.

I recently switched my blog over from Blogger to Grav, and while quite a nifty platform on its own, Grav really shines once you prop it up with some custom themes and plugins.

This post will list the plugins I believe to be essential for a developer’s personal blog, and the reasons behind each suggestion.

Among the plugins on his list are options like:

• The Grav Admin panel
• Google Analytics integration
• External link functionality
• Code highlighting

He includes examples of what the output of each looks like when integrated into the site and how to get them installed and configured. Check out the remainder of the post for more in his list of suggestions.