The TutsPlus.com site has posted the latest in their "Programming with Yii2" series of tutorials with this new article looking at features for the application useful to build community around the site.

In today's tutorial, I'm going to show you how to extend Yii to easily mimic a site like Reddit with voting, comments, and sharing.

[...] I built some my latest Twitter API episodes on the early version of this platform, following friends on behalf of users and analyzing our followers. The site I described in those, Twixxr, forms the foundation of my Yii customization work.

So adding core functionality like voting, comments and sharing makes so much sense. As you expand your Yii codebase with these kinds of features, building new sites becomes faster, easier and increasingly powerful.

He then spends the rest of the article showing how to use three Yii2 plugins to help provide the community functionality he needed: a voting extension, a plugin for integrating Disquis and a "social extension" for other social plugins and widgets. He shows how to get these extensions installed and what code updates you'll need to make to use them across the application. This also includes screenshots of the results so you can be sure that you're on the right track.

The Codevate blog has a tutorial posted by Chris Lush showing how to "drive user engagement" with Disquis in a Symfony-based application. He basically shows how to use commenting, with the help of Disquis, to encourage user participation with your content without having to build your own.

Engaging your audience is an ever-increasing concern when publishing content, since having a community that visitors can witness and interact with can help drive repeat traffic to your website. One such approach would be to let users write comments about your content, creating discussion that others can engage with. The temptation to implement your own comment system is strong since at a surface level it's a simple problem to solve, but to build a robust solution that can deal with moderation requirements such as banning & blocking users, editing comments, or just exploring related threads within a forum can easily turn your "users can write comments" requirement into another project in its own right.

Disqus to the rescue.

He starts by showing the benefits that using Disquis can provide to your site and outlines the steps required to get it up on your site. He then walks you through the process, step-by-step, of registering with the Disquis service, adding the code to your site and even integrating single sign-on with your own backend system.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted helping those Sculpin users out there get the most from their site with some helpful customization tips. Sculpin is a PHP-based static site generation tool that converts Mardon files and Twig templates into HTML documents ready for use.

If you’re a PHP developer and currently running a blog with a static site generator such as Octopress or Jekyll, wouldn’t it be great if you could use your primary language for it? Yes, it’s healthy for us developers to use more than one language, but let’s be honest – we often want to add some functionality to our blogs, but it’s difficult to accomplish in unfamiliar syntax. In this article, we’ll set up Sculpin, a static site generator for PHP. Just like any other static site generator, it uses markdown files and HTML templates to generate your blog, so the transition should be easy.

The tutorial starts by helping you get Sculpin installed (as a phar executable) and move it to where it's globally accessible. With that installed the article then helps you make a simple blog, customize some of the basic settings and start in on a new blog post. With that in place it then gets into the customization, adding in:

• syntax highlighting
• Disqus commenting
• blog archive links

The post finishes up showing you how to deploy the resulting blog into a GitHub pages repository and pushing them out for public consumption.