Tomas Votruba has a new post to his site sharing some of the ways you can get the most out of Travis-CI, the popular build service, for your PHP applications.

Travis CI is the most spread CI in checking open-source projects.

Do you want to know how to use it 3x faster? How to make Travis generate code for you? And how to make your tokens safe?

He breaks down his suggestions into a set of seven tips:

• Skip x-debug
• Deliver PR Checks Fast
• Use ENV vars
• Use Travis to do More Just Watching
• Rebuild your GitHub Pages Daily
• Stay Secure
• Make use of Composer Scripts

For each item in the list he includes an example of what's required, either a change in the Travis-CI configuration, code, or in the Composer configuration.

Tomas Votruba has a post to his site sharing his top seven tips for writing exceptions that "everyone will love" and how they could be considered a more than just a programming tool.

Do you ever had that feeling, that you've seen that exception before and you know what it means and how to solve? What if that would be clear even for those who see it for the first time? It would save yours and their time.

Exceptions are not just error state. Exceptions are the new documentation.

He starts off by describing a situation just about any developer would be familiar with, the "circle" where an exception is thrown when something breaks and there's no additional information so you're back to where you started. Based on his work in the EasyCodingStandard he's come up with seven tips to help prevent this in your applications:

1. Make Exception Names for Humans
2. Use " around" Statements
3. What Exactly is Wrong?
4. What is The Wrong Value?
5. What File Exactly is Broken?
6. What Options do I have?
7. Link what You can't Fit 140 Chars

For each item on the list there's code snippets illustrating the suggestion and a brief description for more context.

On the QuickerWP blog there's a new post with some recommendations of plugins and techniques you can use to make your WordPress blog "fly" (increase the overall performance).

WordPress sites are notorious for their poor loading times. The platform itself comes with very few optimizations, and once you start adding plugins, things will only go south from there. [...] Most of the performance penalties actually come from having too many plugins installed, a poorly optimized site configuration, and a theme that does not optimize loading speeds (most of them don’t).

[...] It’s rare to see high marks [on Yellow Lab Tools] (a B or A result), but after applying the tweaks listed here, we’ve managed to get our own site to score an A (92/100) result, and surprisingly low loading times. Try it on your site to see how you fare.

They have a list of seven recommendations:

• Autoptimize plugin
• WP Fastest Cache plugin
• PurifyCSS
• TinyPNG plugin
• Guetzli (for image optimization)
• CSS Sprites
• QuickerWP

Each item in the list comes with a brief description of the enhancement it brings to the table and links to find out more information.

For those out there wanting to learn more about the Laravel framework but weren't sure where to start, the Laravel News site has just the post for you. In this new guide they provide seven steps to help you learn about Laravel and its use more effectively.

As the community grows, there are many resources available to help you learn Laravel. That’s great! But, how do you choose the best one? Which will be the best use of your time to read or watch? For those new to the framework, I’m sure these questions are on your mind, here are seven tips to help you learn Laravel more effectively.

Some of these tips will be specific to Laravel, while others are more general for learning any programming language or framework.

Their steps start with some of the more foundational stuff like learning about Composer/OOP/PHP first before venturing into the framework at all. Then, with that knowledge under your belt, you can move on to the other steps: where to learn the most effectively (books, courses, videos, etc) and actually putting fingers to keys and start writing code. He makes recommendations about how to use Google and Stack Overflow to help you find what you need an, finally, the advice to find a mentor to learn from and to not give up even if you hit something difficult.

While PHP developers usually pay more attention to the code level of things, it's good to know something about managing the servers their applications live on too. In this most recent tutorial from NetTuts.com they introduce you to some of the basic things you can do to help secure your server against potential attacks, more specifically around the logins.

Thanks to the growing abundance of useful self-hosted apps such as WordPress and the affordable growth of cloud hosting providers, running your own server is becoming increasingly compelling to a broader audience. But securing these servers properly requires a fairly broad knowledge of Linux system administration; this task is not always suitable for newbies.

They provide a list of seven things to look at (not a comprehensive list, but good none the less) to protect your system logins:

• Update Your System Components
• Change Your SSH Port From the Default
• Activate a Firewall
• Change Your Root Login Name
• Activate Google Two-Factor Authentication
• Switch to Using SSH Keys for Login
• Manage Your Application Security

Each item includes a summary of the "why" and commands or links to other resources with more information.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post today from Matthew Beaumont with severn reasons to choose Yii2 as your framework for your next project. The Yii framework is a full-stack framework option and has been around for a long time. It recently reinvented itself with version 2 and has improved a lot of the original functionality.

Late last year, SitePoint published an article highlighting the top PHP frameworks. Tied for the number four spot was the Yii (pronounced Yee) Framework. At that time the latest version of the framework available was 1.1.14. Recently, Yii 2.0 was made available, so you can begin to use it in production. While we did cover it recently when it was still in RC status, it just reached full release status, and we feel like it's time to revisit the topic with some reasons for choosing it over alternatives.

He includes brief descriptions with each of his seven points (some with links to other information too):

• Easy to Install
• Utilizes Modern Technologies
• Highly Extensible
• Encourages Testing
• Simplifies Security
• Shorten Development Time
• Easy to Tune for Better Performance

Some of the items in the list include code snippets showing how they're implemented as well. Be sure to give it a look if you're trying to decide on your next framework or toolset.