The SitePoint PHP has posted an interesting tutorial describing a Node.js frontend workflow without Node.js, instead using PHP tools to replace the Node.js functionality needed for the build.

If you’re intimidated, exhausted or irritated by Gulp, Grunt, NPM, Yeoman, and all the other NodeJS tools that aim to help but often do the opposite, a good asset management workflow is possible in PHP, and this tutorial aims to prove it. In this article, we’ll go through a NodeJS-free PHP front end asset management setup.

He uses three tools to create the build process: BowerPHP for installing assets, markstory/mini-asset for minification and Robo for automation. He sets up a Homestead virtual machine instance as a testing ground first then creates a basic Slim-based application from the slim3-skeleton package. He gets the necessary tools installed via Composer then gets into the details of the process. He adds (Twitter) Bootstrap into his assets, shows how to set up the minification and creates a Robo task to watch the CSS for any changes. This task then re-runs the minifaction on the CSS and created the condensed version automatically.

In a new post today, Kae Verens takes a look at a method for easy and quick javascript minification with help from a little bit of PHP.

A useful part of minification is that during the act of compiling your minified source, you can also pull in other JavaScript files and compiled them all into one single source. This has a major advantage that there is only one file to download.

The method runs a file_get_contents on each of the javascript files, and pulls their content into a single PHP variable. This value is then just echoed out after it's passes through this minimizer class.

Kae also offers an alternative to performing this expensive operation each time - caching then checking the md5 hash of the cache to see if it's different than the current version. Example code is included.