The North Meets South podcast, hosted by PHP community members Jacob Bennett and Michael Dyrynda, has posted their latest episode - Episode #47: Reinventing form controls, typing ahead, and converting MySQLi to Query Builder

In this new show Jacob and Michael return after a hiatus during the summer to talk largely about accessibility in applications (including forms and the overall UI) and updating the Query Builder to work with MySQLi versus MySQL.

You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 of the show. If you enjoy it, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter to stay up to date on when new shows are released.

On the Scotch.io site a new tutorial has been posted showing you how to use the Laravel-permission package (from Spatie) to more easily handle permission setup and validation in a Laravel application.

When building an application, we often need to set up an access control list (ACL). An ACL specifies the level of permission granted to a user of an application. For example a user John may have the permission to read and write to a resource while another user Smith may have the permission only to read the resource.

In this tutorial, I will teach you how to add access control to a Laravel app using Laravel-permission package. For this tutorial we will build a simple blog application where users can be assigned different levels of permission.

The tutorial then walks though the installation of the package and some of the new tables it adds to the database when you run the included migrations. It then talks about some of the methods that can be used, both on the backend and in Blade templates, to evaluate if the current user has the roles required. Next up is the creation of the controllers to handle the basic CRUD tasks and working with the blog posts and views to set up the permissions and roles. Finally the tutorial shows the code required to evaluate the roles and permissions of the user and an example of middleware that performs a pre-check to see if a user even has access to manage various pieces of the application.

The Full Stack Radio podcast, with host Adam Wathan, has posted their latest episode with guest David Hemphill - Episode #62: Timezones, Webhook Security, and UI Decisions.

In this episode, David talks about adding timezone support to Crondog, and Adam wrestles with some decisions about dealing with failed webhooks in KiteTail.

We also talk a lot about different strategies for securing webhooks, and what we're looking forward to at MicroConf.

You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter to get the latest announcements when new shows are released.

The TutsPlus.com site has continued their "Building Your Startup" series with this new article enhancing the application they've already created to send requests for scheduling changes.

As the Meeting Planner alpha testing phase began, the clearest feature gap was the inability to change a meeting after it had been scheduled. It's not an easy problem. Is it okay to just change a meeting without a participant's permission? Or should you ask? Or do either, depending on your role in organizing the meeting? What if you just want to ask if it's okay to meet 15 minutes later—that should be easy, right?

Solving all this required some reflecting on the social aspects of adjusting a meeting. Over time, I realized that the ability to adjust meetings easily after they've been scheduled could make or break the Meeting Planner brand.

He then starts out by describing the "tall mountain to climb" in the number of changes to backend, frontend and UX/UI functionality required to add the feature. He includes all of the code changes and additions that need to be made including:

• migrations to add new tables
• UI updates to add options for rescheduling requests
• form changes
• handling request submissions

Each point on the list includes code, screenshots and anything else that was required to make the update.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a new tutorial that asks the question "Can We Use Laravel to Build a Custom Google Drive UI??" In this case it's a simplified version of the current Google Drive functionality, but it's more of a proof-of-concept than anything.

In this tutorial, we’re going to build an app that talks to the Google Drive API. It will have file search, upload, download and delete features. If you want to follow along, you can clone the repo from Github.

They walk you through the full process of getting the application set up, including creating the project on the Google side and grabbing the API credentials for use in your code. They then switch back over to the code side and create a basic Laravel project and configure it with the Google API credentials you just created. Next up is the creation of all of the routes for the list, upload and delete handling in the Laravel app as well as the controllers/views to make them all work. They also include search functionality, letting you easily query the API for files with names matching a certain string.

Rasmus Lerdorf has shared a post to his site detailing how he upgraded his EdgeRouter Lite router (hardware) to use PHP 7 for the uI handling and processing, upgrading it from the PHP 5.4 it came installed with.

After nearly 7 years of service I retired my Asus RT-16 router, which wasn't really a router, but a re-purposed wifi access point running AdvancedTomato. In its place I got a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. It is Debian-based and has a dual-core 500MHz 64-Bit MIPS CPU (Cavium Octeon+), 512M of ram and a 4G removable onboard USB stick for < $100. The router is completely open and, in fact, any advanced configuration has to be done from the command line. The Web UI has been improving, but there are still many things you can't do in it. In other words, exactly the type of device I prefer.

He made use of the open platform the router has to upgrade both the PHP installation and a bit of the web UI code to make things work happily with PHP 7. There's just three steps in his process:

• Getting a Big-Endian MIPS64 build of PHP 7
• Configuration (php.ini)
• Fixing broken stuff

The "broken stuff" in this last item was only a few small changes that needed to be made to the web UI code for raw POST data fetching and session writes. He ends the post with a little summary of the performance post-changes and some about the opcode handling and memory use per request.

On phpied.com Stoyan Stefanov has a new post showing how to do server-side React in PHP. React is a user interface library developed by Facebook and Instagram to make building UIs simpler.

So you know about React and how to build your own components. And you know you can run JavaScript inside PHP scripts, thanks to v8js. So nothing can stop you from rendering React components on the server side in PHP. Which means you send the first view from the server and then continue from there.

He walks you through the process step-by-step, showing how to set up the environment for the components and make a test file you'll use to build the components. He includes the Javascript code to make a simple table based on given data. Using the V8J libraries, he makes an object, pushes the Javascript string into it and render it to a string by executing the code. A screenshot is included showing what the output should look like.

Maarten Balliauw has a new post to his site showing how you can work with a Azure SQL database directly from the UI of the popular PHP IDE, phpStorm.

PhpStorm provides us the possibility to connect to Windows Azure SQL Database right from within the IDE. In this post, we’ll explore several options that are available for working with Windows Azure SQL Database: Setting up a database connection, creating a table, inserting and updating data, using the database console, generating a database diagram and database refactoring.

He includes the instructions and several screenshots showing each step of the above mentioned steps. The database diagram gives you a good overall view of your database structure and allows you to show a visualization of how the tables relate to each other. Note that, though this particular example shows it connecting to an Azure SQL database, the same setup can be used with lots of popular RDBMS out there.

On DZone.com there's a recent article posted by Kasia Gogolek that walks you through the deployment of a web application with the Webistrano tool, a web UI for working with Capistrano. This follows the first article where they talk about the Webistrano installation.

Most of the applications I write, are PHP based, so all of my examples will be based on that assumption, but you can re-use the ideas mentioned for software written in any other programming language. The setup [in the example] discusses just the deployment to the test project. Deployment to the production will be similar, and by the end of the article, you should understand what differences it will require.

She walks you through the creation of a new project, an example of the contents of the "base.rb" configuration file and how to create the stages (environments) to deploy to. Next up is the "recipes" themselves - the configuration steps for the deployment process. In their examples they show how to set permissions, update a database, manage asset files and a bit more to get Plesk installed on a server.