TutsPlus.com has posted the latest part of their "Building Your Startup with PHP" series following along with the creation of a "meeting planner" application based on the Yii2 framework. In this new article the focus is on collecting and managing user feedback and reports for a simple support system.

In this series, I'm guiding you through launching a startup from concept to reality using my Meeting Planner app as a real-life example. Every step along the way, I'll release the Meeting Planner code as open-source examples you can learn from. I'll also address startup-related business issues as they arise.

In this tutorial, I'm going to guide you through how I quickly and economically launched a support system and knowledge base for the application as well as some of the issues and alternatives I considered.

He starts with some of the third-party options he considered including Zendesk, Grove and Freshdesk. In the end he decided to go with the last option as it had the startup-friendly combination of a free account for small business and good functionality at that level. He covers their pricing levels, the signup process and the basic usage of the account and hooking it into Mailgun for sending/receiving emails. He also walks you through customizing the domain to match yours and updating the code to make the "Support" URLs match the new Freshdesk setup.

Mathias Noback has posted the next part of his command bus in PHP series today with a few suggestions about event handling and when it's a good idea to dispatch them.

It was quite a ride so far. We have seen commands, command buses, events and event buses. We distilled some more knowledge about them while formulating answers to some interesting questions from readers.

In this new post, his focus is on collecting the events that happen as a part of the command's execution. He uses his "UserSignedUp" event his his previous example and a "send welcome email" handler to show why it may not be the best idea to execute all events simultaneously. Instead, he recommends making use of event collections (a feature his SimpleBus library supports) to define "providers" that can collect the events that need to happen and delegate the execution of them one after the other. Example code is included all through the post of events, providers and commands that make use of this idea.