“ninjagrl” made an awesome piece of art inspired by the StackPHP project in the course of her #ossart initiative. Instantly bought it for my office.

Buy the print here

Had to choose a CMS for a project lately? It’s a pain. So many options, finite time. The nagging voice in your head which asks “Does the choice come to bite me later on when we are deep into development?” adds to the anxiety.

Been there.

Me and people I work with had the frequent problem of deciding on the best CMS for the project at hand. I thought that this info could surely be valuable for other people too. So I made a quick ebook this week.

It features my criteria for selecting a system, as well as a look at my favorite options, like Static Site Generators, WordPress, Drupal and Perch. It’s aim is to chart the main options that are out there, but also provide an overview of some lesser known options.

First 10 buyers get an exclusive 20% off today by using the code “LAUNCH” at checkout.

Get the book

Since 2012 lots of people have read this blog post about socket programming. It’s the most read post on this blog, year after year. It even got translated into two other languages than English. Many people are sending me questions by email.

Now I’m writing a little book, to make a more comprehensive look at socket programming in PHP.

The book will launch in Fall 2014. You can subscribe now to my mailing list to get the entire first chapter for free, get early access to the launch, and a code for a 20% discount.

Get your free sample chapter now!

A long due update to the Heroku PHP buildpack —which adds support for modern PHP development— is now in public beta. Their Devcenter Article has more info.

You know what’s really awesome about it? You can require heroku/heroku-buildpack-php in your Composer dev requirements and run your apps locally with a Procfile and Foreman, just like every other supported language on Heroku.

Congrats David Zülke!

PSA: Once the official PHP buildpack is stable, I plan to no longer support my own PHP buildpack.

After quite a bit of a pause, I’m starting with some little libs again. First came MustacheJsCompiler and next up is Stack Honeypot.

It’s a port of the excellent Rack::Honeypot Rack middleware and tries to identify and block spam bot requests by inserting a hidden form field with an interesting name.