On the Delicious Brains site, there's a tutorial posted asking WordPress plugin developers if their code is ready to work with Gutenberg, the next major release of the editor used in the popular blogging tool and content management system.

WordPress 5.0 is right around the corner with the flagship feature, the new Gutenberg editor, set to change the WordPress landscape dramatically. Gutenberg not only impacts how you write content in WordPress, but how developers build plugins for WordPress.

[...] In this post I’ll walk you through the process I took for making Intagrate, my Instagram WordPress plugin, Gutenberg-compatible, which will hopefully get you started on making your own plugins Gutenberg-ready.

The post starts with some general things to consider about Gutenberg's functionality as compared to the classic editor and some key places to check in your own plugins. They then provide a guide to testing your plugin by installing the standalone editor package. It then walks through the three main places to check functionality:

• custom post types
• custom meta boxes
• TinyMCE

The post ends with some suggestions of possible enhancements such as making use of shortcodes and converting custom meta boxes.

On the CodeWall.co.uk blog Dan Englishby has shared his list of what he considers the "must have" extensions for the Visual Studio Code editor for PHP developers to help make them more productive and make their jobs simpler.

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is completely competent with the PHP language. It’s something that shocked me personally when it was released as I really didn’t expect it to come prepared for PHP developers. But yep, it is a valid development environment for PHP, and of course, there are plenty of extensions to be used with it.

In this article, I will go through the best available extensions that can be installed with your version of VSCode. With this list of essential extensions you can configure your Visual Studio Code IDE into a wizardry-code-environment.

His list includes tools for a wide range of tooling and helpful functions including:

• PHP Intellisense
• DocBlocker
• PHP Getter & Setter
• Custom Snippet Pack
• PHP Files Extension

Each item in the list has a link to the extension in the VSCode marketplace and a brief description of what it can do.

On the Delicious Brains site there's a new post from Gilbert Pellegram announcing serializededitor.com, an editor specifically designed to help visually edit serialized PHP data.

I recently built a command line daemon in PHP to emulate AWS SQSD for the purposes of testing in Mergebot. As it turns out, one of the benefits of building a large, complex product like Mergebot is that there are pieces of the system that we need to build for the project that might be of use to other developers.

Today, we’re launching that system piece, a free online visual editor for PHP serialized data as serializededitor.com.

In this article, I’ll explain how and why we built this “side” project and how I overcame some of the challenges I faced when building this project.

He starts off with the problem they were trying to solve when creating the editor, mostly centered around determining the differences between two pieces of serialized data. They found something similar to what they were wanting but it didn't provide the "easy editiing" functionality they wanted. He then goes through some of the issues they bumped up against along the way: working with the data and PHP's unserialize, the creation of their own parser, the work to create the Vue.js frontend and re-serializing the data once complete.

They've also open sourced the project over on GitHub so you can clone it locally and contribute back.

For those out there always interested in how other developers have their development environment, Robert Basic has some info on his own setup that might interest you. In this new post to his site he shares his configuration using the Vim editor when writing PHP code.

I made some changes to my Vim setup for PHP development recently, so it’s time to write it all down. I’m more than sure that I’ll break it soon and won’t be able to remember all the things I did to have the current setup.

Some new plugins popped up on my radar, I tweaked some older plugins and I even wrote one for PHPStan!

He starts with the improvements in tag support he's found recently using the Gutentags plugin. He also covers other tools and functionality like:

• Jump to definition
• (Getting the ) current PHP class and method
• PHP namespaces
• Linting
• A promising completion engine for PHP
• PHPStan in Vim
• Debugging

He finishes up the post with a few other helpful supporting plugins for indenting, searching and argument swapping.

Adam Wathan has a post over on his site showing you how you can optimize your PHPUnit workflow in Sublime Text with the help of a few handy snippets.

I've been a big fan of Sublime Text's snippets feature for years.

They make it really easy to generate repetitive boilerplate code, and if you know how to use placeholders and substitutions properly, you can do some pretty magical stuff.

He shares some of his own snippets for automagically:

• creating a new test matching the filename currently selected
• making new test methods with some placeholder content
• making the tests easier to run

For this last point he shows the use of the Sublime PHPUnit package to run the tests through the Sublime menu. Finally he ties it all together in a much simpler workflow including a final "all tests" run before he commits.

On the Laravel News site they've posted a guide showing you how to setup and run PHPUnit tests from Sublime Text, one of the more popular editors for code development.

Sublime Text is a great editor. It’s lightweight, fast, and extremely customizable. However, one downside to it compared to a full blown IDE is it doesn’t come with support for running your PHPUnit tests directly from the test class you are working with.

To solve this problem, Adam Wathan created and released a free package named Sublime PHPUnit that allows you to run your tests from a keyboard shortcut. Let’s take a look at how to add this package to your arsenal.

The post walks you through the installation of the tool (manually cloning the repository) and how to then use it via Sublime's command palette. There's also some instruction on customizing the plugin's setup and allowing for shortcut keystrokes bound to events the plugin provides. The final tip helps you change the tool used to run the tests (the Terminal app by default) over to something like ITerm.

Rob Allen has posted a guide showing you how to make your code PSR-2 compliant with the help of some handy tools, both in and out of your editor/IDE.

Most of the projects that I work on follow the PSR-2 coding style guidelines. I prefer to ensure that my PRs pass before Travis or Jenkins tells me, so let's look at how to run PSR-2 checks locally.

He looks at three different methods - not the only ones out there but three quick to implement ones:

• Using the PSR-2 sniffs for PHP_CodeSniffer
• Automating the checks with Phing
• Editor integration (he shows VIM and Sublime Text)

There's links to the tools mentioned here and screenshots/configuration information showing how to get it set up too.

Matt Stauffer has posted a set of helpful hints for developers using Sublime Text (3) to help make them more efficient and writing code much easier.

A lot of folks in the PHP community have been checking out PHPStorm lately, including myself and most of the developers I work with. We love the code intelligence we get from PHPStorm, but still miss the speed, quick boot-up, and convenience of Sublime Text. Before I blindly assume PHPStorm is the only way to go, I wanted to see: Can I bring the things a PHP-focused IDE provides PHP developers back to Sublime Text and get the best of both worlds?

He starts with a list of "must haves" for him to be able to move from PHPStorm, features it provides that Sublime, an editor not IDE, might not come with out of the box. Most of his suggestions use the Package Control functionality in Sublime so you'll need that installed to try out his examples. He then shows several tools you can install including:

• Sublime PHP Companion (package)
• AllAutocomplete (package)
• Cmd-click for function definition
• Integrating Code sniffing and PHP_CodeSniffer
• DocBlockr (package)
• Git helpers

...and many more. If you're a Sublime Text user, definitely take a look at his list and see if you can find something to help make your development easier.

NetTuts.com continues their series about programming with the Yii2 framework in this new article moving on to the use of the Redactor rich text editor that comes bundled with the framework.

In this Programming With Yii2 series, I'm guiding readers in use of the newly upgraded Yii2 Framework for PHP. In this tutorial, I'm going to introduce you to using the rich text editor Redactor within the Yii Framework. For these examples, we'll continue to imagine we're building a framework for posting simple status updates, e.g. our own mini-Twitter.

Thanks to the Yii community purchasing an unlimited license for the Redactor rich text editor, it's easy to install and use via the "yii2-redactor" extension. They help you get it installed and update a sample form to use it instead of the normal basic HTML textarea for content input. They also show you how to add image support and what it looks like both inline in the editor and the resulting HTML output.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a new Drupal tutorial about allowing multiple editors to work on the same node of content.

have encountered a practical use case where the default configuration options are not enough. Namely, if you need to have multiple users with access to edit a particular node of a given type but without them necessarily having access to edit others of the same type. In other words, the next great article should be editable by Laura and Glenn but not by their colleagues. However, out of the box, users of a particular role can be masters either of their own content or of all content of a certain type. So this is not immediately possible. In this article I am going to show you my solution to this problem in the form of a simple custom module called editor_list.

He walks you through the process, first creating the .info file needed to define the module and the changes needed for the .module file. He creates a few helper functions to get the editor listing for a node and its matching access rules. With the module created he then gets into building the fields, again making helper methods to get the editors for the fields. Finally he "tidies up" and adds an "Authored on" section to the node editor with a helper function to receive and handle the results of this field when the form is submitted.