Freek Van der Herten has posted a guide to sending an email in a Larvel Spark-based system to remind a user that their trial of a service is expiring soon. In this case, it's a monitoring service he offers called Oh Deal.

I'm currently building a webapp named Laravel Spark, a Laravel based template to kick off SaaS projects. It offers logic for organising users into teams, handles trial periods, subscriptions, payments, invoices and much more.

[...] Unfortunately, Spark will not send out a mail to team owners whose teams are in trial periods that will soon expire. Luckily it's easy to add that yourself. I'll show you how to do just that in this post. Along the way, you'll learn some good general tips for sending out emails in batches. Let's get started!

He then starts in on the code, showing first how to locate the teams that should be sent the email. He adds a new field to track when the email was sent and the code required to send the actual email. He shows how to make the command restartable, create the "Mailable" class and the command to send the actual email.

On DZone.com Giorgio Sironi has written up a post about some testing he's done with the ""PHP Refactoring Browser" (more on that here) on some basic code examples.

IDE proponents love, in fact, an Integrated Development Environment that provides all the functionalities you need while writing and editing code; the followers of the Unix way typically write code in Vim while augmenting it via plugins where feasible and leveraging external tools that do one thing, and do it well. [...] Automated refactorings in PHP were out of the league of Vim and Unix users; thanks to Qafoo, however, a new open source tool is able to edit code with predefined refactoring recipes: PHP Refactoring Browser.

He goes through some of the basic features and functionality of the browser, setting expectations a bit. He shows how to get it installed (via Composer) and the results of some of his testing. Rather than including them all in the post, he opted to make actual commits on github of the changes.

PHPFreaks.com has posted this new information about running PHP on a Windows 2008 Server instance and how you can give it a try for thirty days.

Microsoft has been recently engaging in a number of open source projects. They have been working on enhancing performance, security and stability of PHP applications on Windows Server platforms. [...] In cooperation with Microsoft, [we] invite you to trial a Windows based web stack consisting of IIS 7, PHP 5 and SQL Server. Via the PHP on WS 2008 website you will be able to request a 30-day trial with a Microsoft hosting partner

By signing up, you can request a trial of the IIS 7 software. They also provide a Q&A discussion board for those participating in the program that might need any help.

Mike Bernat has come up with a list of (eight things) his best practices when it comes to PHP development:

I suggest a more retro-active approach [than trial and error]. Studying, surrounding, and forcing yourself to abide by best-practice coding standards will yield surprising results in your applications despite the fact that it may seem like more work than it's worth.

Topics included in his list are things like:

• Always develop with error reporting set at E_ALL and E_STRICT
• Portability, Portability, Portability!
• Don't over-think!
• Validate & Sanitize your Inputs!

Check out the rest of the post for more suggestions and explainations.

In a new post on his blog, Jonathan Snook modifies some of his previous comments directed toward CakePHP and bites the bullet to give it a shot.

Despite my previous proclamations, I'm not actually against the idea of using a framework (and in case you're actually not sick of hearing about it, I might have another framework post up my sleeve). But let me set that issue aside. This is really about CakePHP. And I've decided to jump in head first for this project I'm working on.

He documents his initial steps into the framework - the installation (and the suggestion for a wizard to do most of the setup for him) and his opinion on the documentation provided. The installation went smoothly, but the docs are "a little scattered" and light in some places, but the upcoming Bakery might help to fix that.

So far, so good...

In a new post on his blog, Jonathan Snook modifies some of his previous comments directed toward CakePHP and bites the bullet to give it a shot.

Despite my previous proclamations, I'm not actually against the idea of using a framework (and in case you're actually not sick of hearing about it, I might have another framework post up my sleeve). But let me set that issue aside. This is really about CakePHP. And I've decided to jump in head first for this project I'm working on.

He documents his initial steps into the framework - the installation (and the suggestion for a wizard to do most of the setup for him) and his opinion on the documentation provided. The installation went smoothly, but the docs are "a little scattered" and light in some places, but the upcoming Bakery might help to fix that.

So far, so good...