Mohammed Said has a new post to his site sharing how you can add validators conditionally in Laravel based on different requirements using the "sometimes" method.

Laravel's validation library is very powerful and easy to use, using a few keystrokes you can build a strong defence around your application, preventing invalid user input from corrupting the application flow and potentially introducing bugs.

In this post I'd like to highlight a trick related to conditionally adding validation rules, this trick is specially important since I've seen many people on Laravel's GitHub repository opening issues complaining about an un-expected validator behaviour.

He sets up a simple scenario where the "subject" value is required allowing for a custom value but validating the length if custom is selected. He then shows how to modify things to use the "sometimes" method for conditional checks for the same "custom" checking. He also shows how to pass in multiple fields and how to evaluate a "model exists" for a user.

Jesse Schutt has posted a set of helpful hints around simplifying conditional expressions in your PHP code. This can not only make them more readable but also easier to maintain in the future.

As I’ve been reading through Refactoring by Martin Fowler, I’ve found it helpful to rewrite some of the examples from the book in PHP in order to cement the concepts into my mind. While Martin’s examples are primarily in Java, I’ve found an overwhelming majority of the concepts apply to PHP, which is where I spend most of my programming time.

In today’s article, I will attempt to rework the Simplifying Conditional Expressions (pp. 237-270) section into a handful of PHP-based examples.

He touches n a few different types of conditional refactoring and provides examples for each:

• Decomposing the Conditional
• Consolidate Conditional Expression
• Consolidate Duplicate Conditional Fragment
• Replace Nested Conditional with Guard Clause

He ends the post with a reminder about why refactoring like this is important to both you and your code:

Computers excel at taking sets of instructions and stepping through them systematically. They don’t need code to have informative method or variable names. They don’t even need the code to be formatted in a specific pattern (aside for the syntactical requirements). Our goal in simplifying conditional expressions should be to make the code read easier for humans, not for computers.

Matt Stauffer has a post to his site showing you how to use custom conditionals with Blade, the templating engine for the popular Laravel framework.

One of the greatest aspects of Laravel Blade is that it's incredibly easy to handle view partials and control logic. I find myself frequently extracting the contents of a loop out to a Blade partial and then passing just a bit of data into the partial.

But sometimes the repetitive code isn't the view itself, but the conditional logic I'm running.

He gives a practical example of an issue he had in some recent work he's done: a simple site for his physical trainer that needed to test for public vs non-public resources. The same evaluation code was being pasted all over the site so he looked for a better way. He introduces the idea of a custom directive in Blade and how they're converted to PHP out in the view. He shows how to make an @public directive to replace his cut-and-paste logic from before and make the template much cleaner. He includes the code for this simple directive and ends the post with some other possible options use could use the directives for.

Erika Heidi has posted the third part of her beginners guide to working with Puppet/Vagrant for development environments. In this latest post, she focuses on facts, conditionals and modules.

Finishing this guide to Vagrant and Puppet, I would like to show some advanced puppet resources. As I said before, Puppet is really powerful and extensive – I’m covering just the main concepts so you can have a good start point for creating your vagrant boxes.

She talks about the concepts behind facts first, pointing out that they're similar to variables, except that they're pre-defined. Conditionals let you do some basic logic and modules make it simpler to split up the functional pieces of the Puppet configuration into reusable chunks. She includes some code examples for these and how to set up your directory structure so you can create and use modules.

In a new post Mark van der Velden has posted a quick (handy) example of how you can write your PHPUnit tests to be PHP version aware and only test what's needed.

I had a problem with running test cases on multiple CI environments, where one of the two runs on PHP 5.2 and the other on PHP 5.3. This basically meant that all our pretty PHP 5.3 code caused the builds to fail on the 5.2 only machine.

His technique is based on skipping tests that aren't meant for the latest version - like a test that'd only work if the server's running PHP 5.3 or greater. The key is in the PHP_VERSION constant that makes it simple to check what you're running. He also points out that you can use the @depends to achieve a similar functionality.

On the SmartyCode.com site there's a quick new post about making your Zend Framework site a bit more "green" with a conditional GET feature.

In this article I'll show you a simple approach to enable your Zend Framework application saving lots of precious bandwidth, and thus, making it more end-users friendly, and save on bandwidth costs. This technique involves HTTP conditional GET. This is basically a feature of the HTTP protocol. By sending correct HTTP headers with your application, you enable browsers of your end users to cache pages of your site.

A plugin for the front controller (with a dispatchLoopShutdown method inside) is used to handle the requests and cache their content correctly. They have the cache set at 7200 seconds (2 hours) for a time to live, but its easy to tweak it based on your application. TO use the plugin call the registerPlugin function on the controller object and add it as the very last thing that runs.

DevShed continues their series looking at the XDebug extension for PHP with this fifth part looking a bit more at the code coverage functions it comes with.

In this fifth part of a series on using the Xdebug extension to help debug your PHP programs, we'll take a closer look at the xdebug_start_code_coverage() and xdebug_get_code_coverage() functions. Specifically, we'll see how we can extend their usage when working with conditional statements. As always, we'll complement theory with a number of hands-on examples.

They start with a review of the previous tutorial (that started the look at code coverage) and continue on to show how to extend a code coverage class to debug some conditionals and return the results in a simple echoed output.

Sameer has posted the first article in his "Refactoring" series today - a look at boiling down conditional expressions to only the logic that are really needed (and maybe replacing it all together).

Many times you see a group of conditionals where the returned values are the same. To make the code cleaner you can group the conditionals together using the '&&' or the '||' operators and then extract the code into a separate function. This also has the added benefit that you can reuse the extracted method in other places where the required conditional goes.

He shows how abstracting out a file upload permissions check to another function makes it easier to reuse and simpler to understand (an "if" versus multiple "return" statements).

DevShed continues their series focusing on the CodeIgniter framework with the seventh part - a look at interacting with the database to update, delete and insert rows from your application.

You've seen some of the things you can accomplish with the Code Igniter PHP framework in earlier parts of this series. In this seventh part of the series, you will learn, through copious examples, how to perform insertions, updates and deletions on a selected MySQL table by using Code Igniter's database class. You'll see that these tasks are very intuitive and easy to grasp, thanks to Code Igniter's friendly learning curve.

They show how to make conditional select statements (with where clauses) and do both inserts of new information and updates to current information, all with the built-in model functionality the framework provides.

DevShed has posted the next part of their series focusing on the CodeIgniter framework. This new tutorial looks at the Active Record class that sits at the heart of the framework.

Welcome to the sixth installment of the series entitled "Introducing the Code Igniter PHP Framework." By using a hands-on approach, this series of articles walks you through the main features that come packaged with this friendly yet powerful development software that lets you quickly build robust PHP applications.

They show a simple example of how to pull information out of your database, how to get a little more complex with conditional select statements and how to use a where to narrow down your results.