On the Exakat blog there's a new post sharing six good practices for "use" in PHP. The "use" keyword has a few different places it is used in PHP (like importing namespaced classes and passing in values to closures).

While reviewing code recently, I realized there are no guidelines for use. Every modern code do use ‘use’ (sic), as importing classes from composer or a framework is the norm. There are now quite a few variations in syntax for importing classes or traits. Although the impact on performance is low, as use is solved out, having a clean approach to ‘use’ is important to keep the code clean and readable. Let’s review what are the six good usage of use.

Each of the six tips they share come with a bit of explanation and code to back them up:

• Do not import unused classes
• Alway use alias
• Place all use at first
• Avoid using the same alias for different classes
• Group use expression for easy reading
• Limit the number of use expression

Some of them could be argued as to whether or not they're a "best practice" but it'd definitely interesting to see some tips for the use of this increasingly common little keyword.

On the SitePoint PHP blog author Bruno Skvorc continues his series about using the Grav flat-file CMS to create fast, simple sites. In his previous post he talked about the use of various "must have plugins". In this latest post he focuses more on some "tweaks" you can make to prepare your site for higher load.

We previously looked at some essential Grav plugins with which to round off the installation of a personal blog. In this post, we’ll take a look at some additional, advanced plugins, rounding it all off with an installation of Varnish for supercaching, taking performance to a whole new level.

His list of "tweaks" (and other plugins) that are recommended for a more robust site are:

• The "Related Pages" plugin
• An "assets" plugin for custom JS and CSS without extending the theme
• Simple search handling
• Comments on the content with the JsComments plugin
• Image Optimization and CDNs
• Caching with Varnish

All but the last item on the list are plugins you can drop in and configure pretty easily. Varnish requires a little extra setup, however, as it's an external service/software that needs to be running in front of your web server to do its job.

On the UserSnap blog Luciano Mammino has provided a guide to building fast applications in the cloud using PHP and several tools and techniques. He offers a list of six rules to follow to make building the applications fast (and fast applications).

In this post Luciano highlighted some of the most common principles you should consider while building high performing web applications (specifically on the backend part). The following concepts discussed here can be applied to any language and framework. Though this post will cover some concrete examples, design patterns and tools that are mostly used in the PHP ecosystem.

His list of rules includes tips like:

• Avoid premature optimization
• Defer the work you don’t need to do immediately
• Use cache when you can
• Prepare your app for horizontal scalability when possible

Each point comes with a paragraph or two of explanation as to why it's an issue to watch out for and some tips to help prevent it as well as tools that can help.