The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post today from Tounes Rafie showing you how, in a Laravel framework based application, to create a minify command with the framework's "artisan" command.

In this article you’ll learn how to use Laravel’s Artisan command line tool, and how to create a customized command. Note that you need to be familiar with the Laravel framework to get the most of this article. In this tutorial we’re going to build a command to minify our css assets.

He starts with a (very) brief look at what Laravel commands are and the options this articular one will include. Next up is the code you'll need to create the command, making use of Laravel's integration of the Symfony Console component. He shows how to register the command with the rest of the application and how to work with the options/arguments for the input. From there he shows how to run the command and how to make some other improvements including colorized output and more information on execution.

Gonzalo Ayuso has a handy performance tip for getting that little bit extra speed from your page load times - combining Javascript with PHP files.

One of the golden rules when we want a high performance web site is minimize the HTTP requests. Normally we have several JavaScript files within our projects. It’s a very good practice to combine all our JavaScript files into an only one file. [...] But if your project is alive and you are changing it, it's helpful to spare your JavaScript files between several files. [...] So we need to choose between high performance and development comfort.

He includes a quick script that runs through your javascript directory (recursively), grabs all of the javascript content from each, combines and minifies them to serve gzip compressed out to the browser.

David Abdemoulaie couldn't find just what he was looking for when it came to a minification tool for his Javascript/CSS in his Zend Framework applications so he developed bundle-phu.

I’ve used a few different CSS/JS bundlers, but none have ever fulfilled all that I needed. [...] Thus, I created bundle-phu. Bundle-phu is a set of Zend Framework view helpers that do all of the above. Bundle-phu is inspired by, bundle-fu a Ruby on Rails equivalent. [...] It automagically concatenate, minify, and gzip your javascript and stylesheets into bundles. This reduces the number of HTTP requests to your servers as well as your bandwidth.

He includes how to install it, how to use it in your code and what the end result is when you view the actual HTML source. You can check out the latest version from the project's github account.

The TechFounder blog has a few general tips you can use to help your web pages go a bit faster:

As it might be expected, there are several techniques to optimize the delivery of web pages. The Exceptional Performance guide by Yahoo is a great resource for a multitude of optimizations practices, including specifically two techniques which I will address in this article - script minifcation and concatenation.

Suggestions include reducing total request counts and minification of external libraries via the Minify tool.

Matthew Turland has written up a new tutorial explaining something that isn't "currently very well documented" in the Zend Framework - output filters.

They're mentioned in passing in the Zend_View documentation, but not reviewed in detail anywhere in the Reference Guide as of version 1.5.2. I was curious enough about how to implement markup minification that I decided to trace through the Zend_View source code in attempt to discern how output filters actually worked. As it turns out, it's actually pretty simple.

He explains a simple example of how they work, using a Zend_View object to build the filters on (addFilterPath/setFilterPath), and how he created his own output filter - the Minify filter. A minifier removes the comments and whitespace in the output to help reduce its size.