The QaFoo blog has a new post today showing you how to use Mink with PHPUnit. Mink is a testing tool that allows you to write tests as if they were happening through a browser.

Another day for a short PHPUnit trick. If you want to use PHPunit to control a browser for functional or acceptence tests, then you can easily do this using the Mink library. Mink is well known from the Behat community to facilitate Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD), but it is a standalone library that can be used with PHPUnit just as easily.

This is more flexible than using dedicated browser abstractions such as Selenium directly from PHPunit, because you can switch between different implementations or even run tests with multiple implementations using the same code base.

They start with the command you'll need to get Mink installed via Composer (a simple require) and come example code for a test on the Wikipedia site (the page about PHP). They then refactor this a bit to remove the boostrapping of the Mink client into a reusable trait, making it simpler to use in other tests. They also refactor the test to use the trait and include the phpunit.xml configuration needed to run it.

In a new post to the HHVM blog, Brett Simmers looks at the recent announcement from Wikipedia and how they made the switch to HHVM and the impact it made.

If you’ve been watching our GitHub wiki, following us on Twitter, or reading the wikitech-l mailing list, you’ve probably known for a while that Wikipedia has been transitioning to HHVM. This has been a long process involving lots of work from many different people, and as of a few weeks ago, all non-cached API and web traffic is being served by HHVM. This blog post from the Wikimedia Foundation contains some details about the switch, as does their page about HHVM.

Brett spends the rest of the post talking about his time working with the Wikimedia foundation and some of the hurdles they had to tackle along the way. This included things outside of PHP too like an issue with their Lua extension and compile changes in the installed PCRE version (no JIT). He also shares some of the statistics (in graph form) of the results of the move to HHVM from normal PHP5 - an impressive drop of around 7 seconds, median save time. He also includes a graph showing the server loads and the resulting (very impressive) drop from the move.

In this new post on the SitePoint PHP Blog, there's a look at the Wikipedia and Mediawiki software in the context of the PHP world.

There's mention of Brion's talk presented to Google as well as the more recent Pro:PHP Podcast intervew with him detailing Wikimedia and PHP's place in it.

In this new post on the SitePoint PHP Blog, there's a look at the Wikipedia and Mediawiki software in the context of the PHP world.

There's mention of Brion's talk presented to Google as well as the more recent Pro:PHP Podcast intervew with him detailing Wikimedia and PHP's place in it.

PHPBuilder.com has posted a tutorial that covers the use of one of the PHP applications that the author "finds useful on a daily basis" - phpWiki.

I like to use "wikis" for documentation for many of the projects I work on. Most of you are probably familiar with the term wiki, coming from the Hawaiian word for quick (wikiwiki). There are quite a few PHP-based wiki tools out there, including mediawiki (which Wikipedia uses), PmWiki and DokuWiki. In this article we will look at PhpWiki, and we'll show you how to configure and use it with your own projects!

They briefly cover the history behind wikis before moving straight into the installation/configuration of the package. Thankfully, wikis have been made to be pretty straightforward - simple special formatting characters are used to style the content in all of the typical HTML elements. They don't provide a complete guide to this formatting, but there are plenty of resources around that talk about that.

They move on to the next logic step every site owner wants - how to customize the look to what you want (or to fit into the rest of your site). There are a few other configuration notes that they make and links to other resources including the software's homepage and documentation.

PHPBuilder.com has posted a tutorial that covers the use of one of the PHP applications that the author "finds useful on a daily basis" - phpWiki.

I like to use "wikis" for documentation for many of the projects I work on. Most of you are probably familiar with the term wiki, coming from the Hawaiian word for quick (wikiwiki). There are quite a few PHP-based wiki tools out there, including mediawiki (which Wikipedia uses), PmWiki and DokuWiki. In this article we will look at PhpWiki, and we'll show you how to configure and use it with your own projects!

They briefly cover the history behind wikis before moving straight into the installation/configuration of the package. Thankfully, wikis have been made to be pretty straightforward - simple special formatting characters are used to style the content in all of the typical HTML elements. They don't provide a complete guide to this formatting, but there are plenty of resources around that talk about that.

They move on to the next logic step every site owner wants - how to customize the look to what you want (or to fit into the rest of your site). There are a few other configuration notes that they make and links to other resources including the software's homepage and documentation.