On the Web Technologies blog they've posted a guide to some of the top PHP code quality assurance tools to ensure your codebase is kept neat, clear and clean from any unnecessary complexity.

You’ve got the good approach dear reader: code quality tools are essential to write solid and error-free PHP code. It can help your colleagues detect defects in the codebase and teach them some key concepts.

Don’t forget however that the advises and data they can provide won’t be appropriate everywhere. Your experience and your analysis skills are the one you should trust first.

The tutorial starts of with some of the tooling you'll need to get the system up and running: Composer for package management, terminal access for command execution and editor/IDE integrations (optional, obviously). It then lists out each of the tools and includes installation steps and links to more information:

• PHP-CS-Fixer (PHP Coding Standards Fixer)
• PHPCS (PHP CodeSniffer)
• PHPMD (PHP Mess Detector)
• PHPStan (PHP Static Analysis Tool)
• PHPUnit and the CRAP metric

It also includes a few "bonus" tools that might be useful to track other quality aspects of your code including PhpLoc (lines of code), PHPMND for detecting "magic" numbers and churn-php for evaluating complexity of code based on number of commits. there's several more listed in the full post so be sure to check it out and see how you can integrate them into your development process.

On the Laravel News site they've spotlighted a resource that can help you get the best performance out of your Laravel-based applications: Performant Laravel.

Performant Laravel is a new free video course created by Chris Fidao that covers quick performance wins you can implement right now into your Laravel apps.

The course includes 12 videos that range from three minutes up to twenty minutes, which makes them the perfect size for binge watching during your breaks.

Topics include the use of the "optimize" command, configuration caching, eager loading, MySQL indexing and object caching. The course is free but you do have to sign up to gain access.

On the CloudWays blog author Saquib Rizwan has written up a post sharing some best practices with Yii2 applications, the third part in a series, to help you "turbocharge" your development using included features.

Yii is a popular PHP development framework that has managed to hold its own in the fierce world of PHP framework. In effect, Yii is still a popular development framework for all categories of PHP projects.

[...] Whichever PHP framework you opt for (I personally prefer Yii2), the success of the project depends entirely upon the quality of the code. In all instances, following the Yii development best practices ensures that your code is of the highest quality and that the overall project confirms to the quality specifications. The following Yii best practices are the result of the experiences of the Yii developers from all over the world.

Included in his list of recommendations are practices like:

• Follow the Code Standards
• Optimized Overheads for Yii
• (Avoiding) Cache Heavy Processes
• Profile and Test Applications

These and the other items in the list include a brief summary of the practice and, on some, links to other resources for more information or tools to help.

Giorgio Sironi has posted a review of a book to his site that shares fifty quick ideas to improve your tests that can help with things like run time, ease of maintenance and following best testing practices.

Fifty quick ideas to improve your tests is, well, a series of fifty quick ideas that you can implement on some of your automated test suites to improve their value or lower their creation or maintenance costs.

These ideas are pattern-like in which they are mostly self-contained and often independent from each other. They are distilled from real world scenarios that the authors (David Evans, Tom Roden and Gojko Adzic) have encountered in their work.

He's included a few quotes from the book he found particularly interesting including mentions of:

• a pyramid of software quality levels
• misunderstanding that testing can somehow be completely replaced by a set of carefully chosen examples
• difficult testing is a symptom, not a problem
• the problem with time-based "sleeping" in tests

You can find the book itself over on Leanpub and can pick up your own copy for around $10 USD.

Matthew Setter has shared three tips to improve the performance of your Zend Framework-based application on his MaltBlue site today:

Today, I want to take you out left field a bit. I want to take you a little away from the everyday, potentially clichéd, advice you likely read when it comes to improving Zend Framework 2 application performance. There’s likely nothing wrong with it; but I’d say you’ve already read it many times. Instead, I’ll show you 3 strategies you may not have thought of – specifically focused around the database. That way, when combined with the standard advice, you’ll be better able to improve performance of your Zend Framework application.

As mentioned, his three tips involve working with database connections and resources:

• Improve your database skills
• Learn key database features
• Move logic to the database layer

This final tip advocates the use of things like stored procedures and triggers to handle some of the logic load of the system. This also reduces some of the network overhead as not as much information is having to be pulled "over the wire" as before.

On the Engine Yard blog today PJ Hagerty has a new post sharing some of his suggestions to help improve your local tech-related group and promote growth.

There are hundreds of User Groups across North America and around the world. These groups are primarily socially based or hacker groups who gather regularly to work on group or individual “toy” projects. Most groups will remain small and insular. It’s easy to stick with what is familiar and keep recycling the same format every month. Unfortunately, this leads to stagnation and apathy by group members. People will eventually stop showing up and the group will either suffer along or just cease to exist.

He suggests things that are easier when there's more than one person involved in making it a success - things like "diversify responsibilities" and having a "coordinator for outside the group activities", but they're helpful tips. He also points out a few other things to remember - that communication with the group is key, "thinking globally" to get your group involved outside the local scope and getting sponsors involved.

On the Zend Framework blog they're asking for your help with the project's documentation. They're looking to the users and community members around the framework to help them make the documentation more useful and stay up to date.

A piece of software is only as good as its documentation. The Zend Framework team and a dozen or so contributors are working hard to improve the Zend Framework 2 documentation, but we still want you to help us improve it even more. Any kind of help is welcome and greatly appreciated.

Most of what they're looking for is clarity - they want to ensure that what's in the manual makes sense (and is correct for the release it relates to). They're also looking for feedback on what helps you learn best - tutorials, user guides, API docs, etc. Issues and suggestions should be posted to the issue tracker in github. If you're not sure where to start, check out the contributors guide.

In this recent post to Reddit.com, the author recounts some of his past experience in technology and the steps he's taken along the way to improve himself. He's at a loss now, though, and wants recommendations for what to do next (a familiar situation for many):

I started 12 years ago designing websites. back then the fun and the complexity were playing with css, javascript and dhtml. [...] So right now i need some advice because im kind of lost facing so many possibilities. I want to learn the MVC approach, but i think that doing it by learning a different language (like ruby) will help me to increase my knowledge and being able to work with CI, Cake, Zend or Symphony more naturally. What should i focus first? web design tools? frameworks? mobile programming? NoSql databases?

Responses so far talk about things like using version control, even just in personal projects, the usefulness of Ajax/modern Javascript, more advanced CSS techniques, SOA and some framework suggestions to fill the MVC desire.

Do you have a recommendation on what'd be a "next good thing" to learn in the current web development world? Share it here!

On DZone.com today John Esposito has posted about three guides that want to help you improve your PHP development skills (including a forum post and two articles).

Sometimes, then, improving your generic 'programming brain' will help you improve your facility with a particular language. At other times, it's more important to learn the nuances of a language, paying close attention to the kind of applications the language is used for. [...] For improving your PHP, then, you can do two things: become a better programmer; and understand PHP more finely, more deeply.

The three guides share a lot of the same concepts in common - naming conventions, separation of functionality, DRY (don't repeat yourself), testing code, etc.

On the Zend Developer Zone there's a new tutorial written by Nathan Good about improving the quality of your Flash applications (built in Flash Builder 4) with the help of unit testing with PHPUnit.

Unit testing is becoming a fairly common element of software projects because of its promise of providing better quality to the code base. [...] This article is about improving your code quality in a sample project using Adobe Flash Builder 4 to build a rich user interface (UI) and connecting to PHP services via Zend Action Message Format (AMF). In this article, you learn how to write tests using two frameworks: FlexUnit and PHPUnit.

He starts with an overview of unit testing - why you should test your applications even though it might seem counterproductive and a description of what parts of your application the two testing tools (FlexUnit and PHPUnit) can help with. He first focuses is on the latter of the two and he shows how to get PHPUnit installed and write a first test on an example class. Following that, he moves over to the FlexUnit side and gives the same class and first test example. He then talks about running and automating the testing on both sides and even touches on things like continuous integration and code coverage results.