Stuart Herbert On PHP

Phix v0.14 is now available from pear.phix-project.org.

What’s New In This Release

• Snapshot versions of components – not ready to release a stable version of your component, but still need to publish your component to your PEAR channel for testing? You can now set the project.snapshot property in your build.properties file, and get non-stable packages for distribution.
• Code coverage improvements – when you run phing test to run your component’s unit tests and generate the code coverage report, the code coverage report now automatically picks up all of your component’s PHP code, regardless of whether there is a test for it or not.
• phpunit.xml support – phix now puts a phpunit.xml file inside your component, which includes all of the settings required to execute your component’s unit tests. This should help TextMate users a lot. This change was requested by attendees at the PHPNW11 conference.
• More hooks in build.local.xml – for every target in your component’s build.xml file, you can now add “local.<target>” in build.local.xml, to perform any additional steps that you want to do. This feature was contributed by Martin Wernståhl.
• Usability improvements – your component’s build.xml file now traps more errors than before, hopefully making it even easier to learn how to work with components.

How To Upgrade

To upgrade from an earlier release of Phix, please do the following:

sudo pear clear-cache
sudo pear upgrade phix/phix4componentdev

Once you’ve upgraded phix itself, don’t forget to go into each of your components, and run

phix php-library:upgrade .

to upgrade all of the skeleton files (build.xml et al) for your component.

What’s Coming In Phix 0.15

Phix 0.15 is all about making sure that Phix works as well on Windows as it already does on Linux and OSX. The feedback from the ZendCon session (which I was gutted to be unable to attend) was that there isn’t much needed, mostly setup instructions. Once that is done, we’ll continue to support Phix on Windows just as we already do on Linux and OSX.

Our roadmap for Phix 0.15 has all the details.

About The Author

Software archaeologist, toolsmith, passionate educator, engaging author and speaker, experienced engineer and successful CTO - Stuart is always happiest when sat in front of an open text editor working on code, or collaborating with others on bringing big ideas to life.

The PHP North West User Group ran it’s 4th (and largest yet!) PHP conference – PHPNW11 in Manchester last weekend.

My last set of photos from PHP North West 2011 are the odd ones out, the ones that didn’t really fit into any of the other sets.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my photos from the conference, and maybe – just maybe – they’ve made you think about going to a PHP conference somewhere near you in the near future.

About The Author

Software archaeologist, toolsmith, passionate educator, engaging author and speaker, experienced engineer and successful CTO - Stuart is always happiest when sat in front of an open text editor working on code, or collaborating with others on bringing big ideas to life.

The PHP North West User Group ran it’s 4th (and largest yet!) PHP conference – PHPNW11 in Manchester last weekend.

No conference – especially one as well-run as PHP North West – can happen without the small army of folks who give up their time to organise and staff the conference. I’m afraid that I didn’t manage to photograph everyone involved on the day (sorry!) but here’s to everyone who made PHP North West 2011 possible.

About The Author

Software archaeologist, toolsmith, passionate educator, engaging author and speaker, experienced engineer and successful CTO - Stuart is always happiest when sat in front of an open text editor working on code, or collaborating with others on bringing big ideas to life.

The PHP North West User Group ran it’s 4th (and largest yet!) PHP conference – PHPNW11 in Manchester last weekend.

This year, many of the sponsors were here not to drum up new business, but to hire new talent, continuing a trend from PHPUK11 earlier in the year. Sponsoring a conference is cheaper than paying traditional recruiters, with no shortage of motivated attendees to talk to.

Community tech conferences like PHP North West simply could not happen without the funds raised from the organisations who sponsor each conference. This short set of photos is my way, as a conference speaker, of saying thank you to every organisation who sponsored this year’s PHPNW conference.

About The Author

Software archaeologist, toolsmith, passionate educator, engaging author and speaker, experienced engineer and successful CTO - Stuart is always happiest when sat in front of an open text editor working on code, or collaborating with others on bringing big ideas to life.

The PHP North West User Group ran it’s 4th (and largest yet!) PHP conference – PHPNW11 in Manchester last weekend.

The audience is a key part of any conference, and each year the PHP North West conference manages to attract more and more people back as it establishes its reputation for being one of the very best PHP conferences (and indeed, one of the very best UK tech conferences) around.

If you’ve never been to any PHP conference anywhere before, I hope these photos manage to show you just a little bit of the cracking atmosphere you’re missing out on :)

If you like these photos, please do let me know – leave a comment on my blog, or click through each photo to Flickr and leave a comment there. Thanks!

About The Author

Software archaeologist, toolsmith, passionate educator, engaging author and speaker, experienced engineer and successful CTO - Stuart is always happiest when sat in front of an open text editor working on code, or collaborating with others on bringing big ideas to life.