The Paragon Initiative has a recent post to their blog that's kicking off a new series of posts called "Slice of PIE". In these posts they hope to provide answers in a Q&A style, answering questions commonly asked of them via Twitter or other means.

Astute readers have noticed that our blog posts have decreased in frequency this year. We put a heavy emphasis on quality, not so much on quantity.

At the same time, we field a lot of questions on social media, where our answers (and, sometimes, the questions themselves) are difficult to locate, especially when people close or lock their accounts.

With both of these thoughts in mind, I asked my Twitter followers if they'd be interested in a Q&A-style blog series. I expected maybe a 55:45 split on yes/no responses, but the final tally was overwhelmingly "Yes".

So with that in mind, I'd like to introduce the pilot for our new series, Slice of PIE.

In this inaugural edition they start by sharing how readers can get their questions answered and what kinds of questions will be answered. To kick things off they answer a question about the use of asymmetric encryption and comparing it to hybrid encryption.

Christoph Rumpel, lead developer on the BotMan project has a new post to his site walking you through the process and code he used to create a LaravelQuiz chatbot using a combination of the library and Laravel.

Ever wondered how well you know your favorite PHP framework Laravel? Give the LaravelQuiz Chatbot a try, and you will find out. This article is a step by step guide on how I created this chatbot with BotMan and Laravel.

He starts off by introducing the project and what some of the basic features are. Next comes some of the setup, including the botman command line tool and the creation of the BotMan-based project. As the tool uses a connection to Telegram, he also installs the client library for that and sets up the related credentials. Next comes the storage of the questions and answers (migrations and models) and the creation of the QuizConversation class to handle the interactions. There's also code examples for showing the current quiz status, making a "high score" list, and a few other extras. All code and command line calls you need are included in the post.

On the Pineco.de site there's a new post that answers some of the frequently asked questions they've heard about APIs in Laravel-based applications.

Developing APIs are getting more and more popular, but still, it’s a bit blurry field for many developers. We collected some common questions and tried to answer them in one place.

Their list of questions includes:

• "What does RESTful mean?"
• "How does API authentication work?"
• "Why Laravel has a “web” and an “api ” middleware group?"
• "How can I test my APIs?"

For each there's a brief summary of the issue and links to other sources (documentation and packages) to help answer or fix the issue.

In a new post to his site Paul Jones shares a conversation he had about handling domain exceptions in controllers and if it was a good practice or not.

A few months ago I had a great email conversation with a correspondent about how to handle business logic exceptions in his controller code. [...] If you find yourself in this situation, the first question to ask yourself is, “Why am I handling domain exceptions in my user interface code?” (Remember: Model-View-Controller and Action-Domain-Responder are user interface patterns; in this case, the user interface is composed of an HTTP request and response.) Domain exceptions should be handled by the domain logic in a domain-appropriate fashion.

He shares the original email (shortened) where they asked their question and outlined their current situation and setup. He points out that the point the other person made about not feeling right to thrown domain exceptions and having the controller handle them is a good path to follow but to take it even further. He suggests modifying the response to the domain logic to be a "domain payload" instead of an exception and then have the controller use that (getting its status) to determine how to proceed. This can prevent the need to catch random exceptions and provides more consistency to the overall flow.

On the Zend blog they've posted an article where Zend's own Cal Evans shares the answers to some of the questions he received from a "unit testing for product managers" webinar.

Thanks to everyone that joined our Unit testing for project managers webinar yesterday. It was great to see so many people engaged and asking questions. I’ve pulled together answers for your questions we didn’t get to on the webcast. If you have more questions, leave a comment below!

If you missed the webinar or want to re-watch it, the on-demand version is now available. The slides are also posted on Slideshare.

The questions he answers touch on topics that include:

• property-based testing
• testing on an existing project (medium or large)
• integration vs unit testing

The final answer covers something shared at the end of the presentation, the resolution to "just do it". Cal backs that statement up with some additional detail and puts it in the mindset of a project manager.

The Laravel News site has posted a video from a recent Laravel Sydney meeting featuring Jeffrey Way, owner and operator of the popular Laracasts screencast tutorial service.

The Laravel Sydney user group had a special guest in their latest meeting. At 5:30am, his time, Jeffrey Way complete with blood-shot eyes and a massive coffee jar did a live question and answer interview with the group led by Ben Corlett.

You can watch the video either through the in-page player or by heading over to YouTube to watch it there directly.

If you've ever worked with the Symfony Console component and wanted to enhance the experience with some additional functionality, check out the latest tutorial from the SitePoint PHP blog: Symfony2 Console: Getting Started with Console Helpers.

In this tutorial, I’ll share my experiences and we’ll give some extra love to the console helpers, which provide us with a large collection of handy functions. There are a lot of reasons to create console commands in your projects: sending emails, exporting/importing data, creating users, and so on. [...] By the end of this post, we want to be able to create a basic console command to generate some output – any output will do – only the way to getting there is important. Near the end, we’ll discover some console helpers in order to create some nice interactions between users and the interface.

He starts by helping you get the component installed via Composer and creating the first simple command line script (a ConsoleApplication). He shows how to add in a basic "hello world" command (conveniently named "BasicCommand") and the result when executed. With this in place, he starts in on three helpers:

• Question Helper
• Table class
• Progress Bar

Each includes the code needed to implement it and the resulting output. You can find out more about the component in the Symfony2 documentation.

In his latest post Derick Rethans shares his answer to a question he was asked at a recent PHP conference regarding the escaping of input before use in a MongoDB query.

At last weekend's PHP Benelux I gave a tutorial titled "From SQL to NoSQL". Large parts of the tutorial covered using MongoDB—how to use it from PHP, schema design, etc. I ran a little short of time, and since then I've been getting some questions. One of them being: "Should I escape my input, and if so, how?". Instead of trying to cram my answer in 140 characters on Twitter, I thought it'd be wise to reply with this blog post. The short answer is: yes, you do need to escape.

He uses the rest of the post to get into the longer answer, a bit more detail about why you should escape and what kinds of things can be done. He points out that, because of how MongoDB queries are created, SQL injection is much more difficult. He does remind you that superglobals can also be used to send arrays too which could lead to unexpected data input. He gives an example of how this would work and why it would be a problem.

So although MongoDB's query language does not require you to build strings, and hence "escape" input, it is required that you either make sure that the data is of the correct data type.

In a new post to the SitePoint Business & Marketing blog Chris Ward asks an interesting question that applies to both the business side and development: do you need an API?.

API stands for ‘Application Programming Interface’ and as the name implies, creating one is a technical process. This article will talk very little about how to create an API as there are a myriad of methods to undertake that. This article aims to focus on the business side of APIs and supply advice for non-technical folk. [...] You may be a forward thinking individual inside of an organizational structure that doesn’t share your views. How can you convince others around you that having an API may be good for your business?

He talks about three of the main kinds of organizations out there that usually have APIs including government, civic and science organizations and most other online services that integrate them into their core services. He also tries to help you answer the question for your own organization by listing some of the positives it can provide as well as some of the negatives that could balance them out. He ends the post with one final recommendation if you do choose to implement an API: "Don't reinvent the wheel".

Mathias Noback has continued his series looking at the use of command busses in PHP applications. In this third part of his series, he answers some questions that have been asked by his own readers.

So far we've had three posts in this series about commands, events and their corresponding buses and handlers: a wave of command buses, responsibilities of the command bus, from commands to events. Now I'd like to take the time to answer some of the very interesting questions that by readers.

He answers questions about:

• The difference between commands and events
• Disadvantages of using a command bus
• The command as constructor argument
• How to return a value from the command bus
• Could commands handle themselves?

Each question comes with a portion of the question from the original author, an explanation and some code where needed to illustrate his point.