I'll be writing a short series of posts on how to create a mobile version of your CakePHP app. I've always been bragging to my peers how awesome CakePHP is, and so now I'm writing a short tutorial on how to create a mobile-friendly version of a CakePHP app. I promise to make this as easy as possible.

In this first part of the series he helps you do two things - set up some custom routes for the mobile version of the site ("/m") and add in browser detection using the RequestHandler's "isMobile()" method.

PHP 5.4 beta 2 was just released, so the final version of 5.4.0 is coming soon. Many PHP Developers want to know when it will be the final PHP 5.4 release date. Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert talk about this and other interesting PHP related topics in episode 17 of the Lately in PHP podcast.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the full mp3 or by subscribing to their feed to get this and past episodes (including ones about MODX and PHPFog).

He goes through the thirteen rules to help improve your website's performance including:

• Make fewer HTTP requests
• Gzip components
• Make JS and CSS external
• Remove duplicate scripts
• Configure ETags

For more information about the YSlow extension (available for Firefox, Chrome, Opera and mobile devices), check out the project's page on Yahoo's Developer section (including ten more rules it checks).

Most of the applications I work on have very straight-forward components and not a lot of complex functions/methods. I would only be testing whether or not they worked at all, rather than if they worked in a wide-array of situations. [...] For example, unit-testing a simple news list and detail page is probably overkill. Sure, you can test your classes by simple instantiating them but that only goes so far. My new method involves using SimpleTest's Scriptable Browser to actually crawl webpages and ensure that the proper data is being displayed.

He includes a few snippets of code to show how to implement SimpleTest's web test functionality - one that just checks a HTTP response values, another that checks for text on the page, one testing for a login on an admin page and a test for add/edit pages to ensure valid loading based on URLs/links.

Character sets can be confusing at the best of times. This post aims to explain the potential problems and suggest solutions. Although this is applied to PHP and a typical LAMP stack you can apply the same principles to any multi-tier stack.

He includes a "boring history" session (and recommends skipping if you just want the good stuff) that talks a bit about character sets and their history in computer system handling. All that said, he recommends using UTF-8 to ease your character encoding woes. He talks about configuring your editor to support it, making sure your browsers understand it and setting up your MySQL database connection to use it.

Since I spend most of my days programming PHP I tend to need that a lot and a few years back I wrote a small script that would let me type php code in my browser and execute it. Nothing fancy, but quite useful. Over the years a few people got interest seeing me use it and asked for the sources, so instead of repackaging it every time, I thought I'd clean it up, polish a bit, add some features, and put it on github.

Setup is as simple as dropping the code somewhere in your local server's document root and offers a textarea for input and a expandable tree for the resulting output. It uses the Krumo tool to create this modified output. You can see a screenshot here.

Years ago I wrote about a Firefox extension that allows you to start an Xdebug debugging session by clicking on an icon in Firefox' status bar. For some unexplained reason, this extension is no longer available through Firefox' addon-site. [...] There are now a few other browser extensions that do the same thing.

He lists three new extensions that can most of what you'd need to keep your testing going - easy Xdebug, Xdebug enabler (for Chrome) and this blog post with a pure Javascript method done with bookmarklets.

The problem is that Internet Explorer does not handle file dowloads without caching over https very well. Or at all. According to knowledge articles on Microsofts website the problem occurs when having one or two of the http headers. [...] Previously I have have just omitted the http header "Pragma: nocache" for IE but it seems it does not always help.

So the fix is relatively simple - rely on the $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] value to tell if it's an IR browser or not. If it is, "Pragma: cache" works. If not, stick with "Pragma: no-cache".

It makes perfect sense to provide the huge community of PHP developers with an overview of useful tools and resources that can make their development process easier and more effective. This post presents 50 useful PHP tools that can significantly improve your programming workflow. Among other things, you'll find a plethora of libraries and classes that aid in debugging, testing, profiling and code-authoring in PHP.

Their long list includes tools is broken up into sections:

• Debugging
• Testing and Optimization
• Documentation
• Security
• Image Manipulation and Graphs
• PHP Code Beautifier
• Version-Control Systems
• Useful Extensions, Utilities and Classes
• PHP Online Tools and Resources
• In-Browser Tools (Firefox Add-Ons)
• Frameworks for PHP
• PHP IDEs and Editors
• Other Sources and Resources

Nowadays, the code debugger is a tool that has almost all programing environments which allows you to watch the internal work of your applications and finding errors at run time for a easy way. The trouble is when you are working in a client-server architecture model, because from where you send the request (client) can not access the code hosted on the server.

He points out FirePHP as one that doesn't require this sort of installation. Included is a quick tutorial on getting it up and running for your development environment as well as the output formats and how to handle the output you want for debugging only.