There are many ways to compress CSS files or automatically generate browser-specific CSS3 prefixes, but usually extra tools are used which is very annoying. I'd like to show you how such tasks can be done using only PHP.

Complete code for this small script is included in the article. It uses some regular expressions to parse the CSS and does some replacement and removal of things from the CSS content to slim it down and format it all as one line. There are some images illustrating the process also included.

Announcing phpDocumentor 2 - the merging of the old (phpDocumentor) and the new (DocBlox). With the first alpha release of phpDocumentor (2.0.0a1), the new "Responsive" default template sports a new page layout, along with the useful layout improvements that the original DocBlox templates provided (which remain available) over the old phpDocumentor templates (which will retire with old phpDocumentor). Explore this new template at http://demo.phpdoc.org/Responsive/index.html.

Users of the current phpDocumentor software (version 1.x) will need to upgrade their documentation and installations. If you'd like more information about the transition or just keep up with the latest on this exciting advancement, check out #phpdocumentor on Freenode IRC or follow @phpdocumentor on Twitter.

In this post, I'll show you how to deploy your PHPUnit tests with your application, have the tests run as a start up task, and have the results written to your storage account for analysis. Attached to this post is a .zip file that contains a skeleton project that you can use to automatically run PHPUnit tests when you deploy a PHP application to Azure. I'll walk you though how to use the skeleton project, then provide a bit more detail as to how it all works (so you can make modifications where necessary).

He has it broken up into a few easy-to-follow steps:

• Download the AzurePHPWebRole zip archive and unpack it
• Copy your application, tests and PHP installation into the resulting file structure
• Create a skeleton "ServiceConfiguration.cscfg" file with the "cspack" command and edit it to change the "osfamily" and "osversion" settings
• Use "cspack" to package up the application and deploy the application

He walks you through the "how it works" steps too - the things that happen for you automatically on the server side to do things like set up the file to log to, configure the PHP environment and execute the "runtests" Powershell file as included in the AzurePHPWebRole download.

Connecting with the Zend DevCloud in Linux is actually quite easy if you know how to use SFTP. [...] But, as I said in a previous post, I hate having to do command line stuff for each and every file or commit. I like things to work seamlessly. So what I did was write a PHP script that connects to the DevCloud (or any SSH-based endpoint for that matter) and then monitors all of the files and directories for changes, such as a creation, modification or deletion event.

His script (available on github) uses the PECL inotify package to work, but once its set up, you can have the PHP process running the script in the background, pointed at your web root, and have it upload automatically.

Recently I was asked if PECL/mysqlnd_ms should be used to add MySQL replication support to a yet to be developed PHP application. The mysqlnd plugin, which supports all PHP MySQL extensions (PDO, mysqli, mysql), stood up against a classical, simple, proven and fast approach: one connection for reads, one connection for writes. Let's compare. This is a bit of an unfair challenge, because PECL/mysqlnd_ms was designed as a drop-in for existing applications, not optimized for those starting from scratch, *yell*... The plugin stands up quite well, anyway!

He starts with a look at the "classical pattern" of using a factory or singleton to make a database object instance that gives back different connections for reads versus writes (slave vs master). The mysqlnd_ms plugin allows you to define configuration settings to tell the queries to automatically go to certain places for different actions. For example, you could use "master_on_write" to tell it to use a master node if you're doing an INSERT or UPDATE versus a SELECT. He also shows a more complex example using a SQL hint and one issue that might come from the "human element" - not paying attention to database character sets.

The PHP Project Wizard (PPW) is a commandline tool that can be used to generate the scripts and configuration files necessary for the build automation of a PHP project. Given the location of a project's directories with sourcecode and tests as well as the project's name, the PHP Project Wizard generates scripts and configuration files necessary for build automation using Apache Ant.

An example of its use is included - a simple call to the shell script with information about the source, tests and project directories. It then generates the XML files for Ant and PHPUunit to run. The result can then be used in the Jenkins jobs for PHP setup seamlessly.

My thesis is that there's a gain in page rendering time when I disable automatic view rendering and use explicit render calls ($this->render('foo');) inside my controllers. And to cut to the chase, there is. On our app, I measured a 12% improvement using Xdebug's profiler - simple before-after-style.

He talks a bit about his setup for testing his theory complete with a customized loader as well as the platform (OS and web server) he ran the tests on. He used Xdebug to run the testing. His conclusion is a pretty obvious one - what you gain in convenience you sacrifice in performance.

In the interests of improving quality in production, of eliminating repetitive tasks, and of general development time saving, it's often a good idea to automate some of the website build process. What do I mean by "website build process"? Put simply, the task of preparation and publication to production (your live, open-to-the-internet environment), from a development environment. [...] I'm going to look at how you can automate the CSS and JavaScript part of the build process using Make, a handy little program that is installed with the standard build tools on most *nix based systems.

He shows how to automate the compression of multiple Javascript/CSS files into a single one (to reduce the number of HTTP requests required) by figuring out what's needed for the page. He shows how to build the Makefile with a few simple rules that concatenate the files together, run a minification tool on them and clean up any onld versions that might be out there. The final step is automatically updating the HTML to include the newly created Javascript/CSS file without having to do each one manually.

Examples of what you'll need to have in your Makefile are all included as well as the commands to issue to get it all working.

This one is simple but sweet, In your Models directory you define your Models and the basic rules they follow but do you know you can also make changes at the record level. Solar is smart and if it sees a Test/Record.php when creating records for the Test model it will load that class, this allows you to do all kinds of magic.

His example shows how the script can automatically check, on pre-save, to see if the data is different than that in the cache and remove it if so. This cached data is replaced the next time through with the latest information.

ffmpeg is such an amazing tool, looks like it's for video what ImageMagick is for images. An all-powerful all-formats wicked cool command-line tool. This blog post is an introduction to some of the MP3 capabilities of ffmpeg. I'll use ffmpeg to transform a blog post into a podcast-ready mp3 file.

The post shows how to use PHP's DOM functions to grab the title and contents of your post (a simple example, at least) and push that information out to a text file. From there, the "say" command is run on it with the "output" file parameter and the result is sent to ffmpeg for compression into an mp3.