StarTutorial.com has posted a new tutorial in their series introducing commonly used design patterns. In their latest article they cover the State pattern.

[The State pattern] allows an object to alter its behavior when its internal state changes. The object will appear to change its class.

In the example situation, a worker at a customer support company and his state when dealing with customers (happy/angry/moderate). They codify this in a SupportRep class with a "state" value to track his mood. They expand on this with some additional conditions for number of calls to change the state as time goes on. This requires several if/else statements to be added. They refactor this to reduce the clutter using the State pattern, passing off the logic to various "state" classes.

The PHPBuilder.com site has a tutorial posted helping you integrate Stripe into your PHP application as a payment gateway service.

Stripe is a payment gateway that is becoming increasingly popular in the Web industry. It offers payment processing services, which can be easily integrated into your Web application using the Stripe API.

Although it is not free (2.9% + 30 cents per transaction), Stripe saves time and reduces cost in many ways: seamless integration and good documentation reduces the amount of time and development hours needed, while it offers complete control over sensitive data which saves hundreds of thousands of dollars that would otherwise be spent on ensuring PCI compliance.

They then show how to set up and use the PHP Stripe API package to create a simple checkout form to accept credit card information and use the stripe.js handling to send it directly to Stripe. Once the service receives it, it then makes a call back to your callback endpoint to create a token value for the transaction and customer. This callback then uses the API to make the actual charge using the token for the payment method and the customer information.

In the latest tutorial posted to the SitePoint PHP blog author Wern Ancheta shows you how to integrate your application with the Microsoft Text Analytics API, a service offered by the company putting machine learning to work on things like keyword extraction, topic detection and language detection.

With the explosion of machine learning services in recent years, it has become easier than ever for developers to create “smart apps”. In this article, I’ll introduce you to Microsoft’s offering for providing machine-learning capabilities to apps. Specifically, you’ll learn about the Text Analytics API and build an app to enhance the understanding of online sellers when it comes to their customers.

The tutorial then introduces the Microsoft Cognitive Services API and, more specifically, the Text Analytics API that they'll be hooking the application in to. They walk you through getting an API key for the service, creating an "account" for the application you're working with and deploying it for immediate use. They introduce the functionality of the API with a few "play" examples of each API offered before getting into the creation of their sample application - a tool that reviews the contents of customer feedback, looking for key phrases and returns highlighted versions with what it sees as important.

The /Dev/Hell podcast, with hosts and PHP community members Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler, has posted their latest episode - Episode 66: Aquinas on Customer Service

Episode 66 was recorded live right after the inaugural Pacific Northwest PHP Conference. We make fun of our sponsors, talk about smelly tests, Thomas Aquinas, remote pairing with juniors, and new stuff happening with OSMI.

Topics mentioned in this episode include the PNWPHP conference, Sara Golemon, Smelly Tests and The Last Starfighter. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. Also be sure to subscribe to their feed or mailing list to get notified when new episodes are released.

Adam Culp has posted the latest episode of his "Run Geek Radio" podcast today - Episode #4: Standing desk, headphones, and firing bad customers.

Adam Culp speaks about his new Varidesk standing desk and launches a giveaway of a Varidesk. Also covers some of the reasons a developer may want to stand while working, and the benefits of standing while working. He also gives some hints and tips related to introducing the use of a standing desk into your daily habits.

He also mentions a new set of headphones he purchased to replace a broken set, and the various reasons why Plantronics Backbeat Pro was his choice. The main topic of firing a bad customer is then discussed by sharing possible reasons why a customer may be considered bad, how to communicate your intent, and some possible pitfalls that result from this potentially emotional event.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player, by downloading the mp3 or subscribing to the show's feed.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a list of seven customer relationship management tools (CRM) that play nice with Drupal, a popular PHP-driven content management system.

Whether you want to call Drupal a CMS (Content Management System), a CMF (Content Management Framework) or a CMSomething, the ‘C’ always stands for Content. Content is where Drupal shines and is what it’s designed for. [...] When an organisation is at a stage and mindset that they also want to manage their contacts and interactions effectively they will often need tools designed specifically for that function. These are generally referred to as a CRM, which stands for Client Relationship Manager or Constituent Relationship Manager, depending on the sector (For-Profit or Not-for-Profit respectively)

[...] What has a CRM got to do with Drupal? Nothing directly, but indirectly if you’re looking to streamline your business operations and automate the ways people can interact with you, your CRM will need to work well with your website. [...] In this article, we will look at several of the big players in the CRM space that work well with Drupal, how they integrate or how developers can get them to integrate.

They start with a list of five of the seven options:

• Roll it yourself
• RedHen
• CiviCRM
• Salesforce
• Sugar CRM

They also provide a few other options combining a few technologies: Microsoft Dynamics and BlackBaud or Nation Builder and Salsa. Links and a brief summary of the project are included for each item in the list. He ends with a few tips about the actual integration, including the use of the CRM tool's API or using the Migrate Drupal module.

The NetTuts.com site has a new tutorial posted today showing how to integrate Zenddesk with WordPress, making it easier to handle customer relationships directly from your WordPress applications.

Timely and efficient customer service is one of the core components of any successful business. With multiple customer touch points and interaction platforms like blogs, social networks, email etc., keeping track of what your customers are saying about your services is becoming harder by the day. For this reason, managing all your customer communication from a centralised platform has become a mandatory business requirement. Zendesk is one of the leading web based customer support and relationship management services with more than 40,000 companies as registered clients, including Shopify and Groupon.

They start with some of the benefits about using Zenddesk for those not familiar with the software (including email management, blog integration and live chat). From there they walk you through a few steps to get the integration up and running using the Zendesk WordPress plugin. They include screenshots of the setup and some of the configuration options you can use to customize the install.

The NetTuts site has posted the first part of a tutorial series showing you how to create an application with Laravel and AngularJS to do some customer management. The application lets you track customers and transactions related to them.

When creating a single-page app we should use some kind of framework to do some of the job for us so we can focus on the actual functionality. AngularJS fits here perfectly, because features like dynamic dependency injection and bi-directional data binding are just great. Sometimes we also require some kind of server. If you've chosen PHP then Laravel may be your best option, as it's easy to work with and pretty powerful. In this part of the tutorial, we will build the front-end of our application using AngularJS.

He starts with some of the "preparation work" that has to be put into the main template for Angular to even work, including the loading of the Angular files themselves. He sets up a basic route and, some initial styling (CSS) and talks about the overall structure of the application. He includes the code to create the customer controller and transactions handling (via controllers) and how to do the usual CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations for each. HTML output templates are also included to handle the forms and other tabluar output needed to display customer details.

On NetTuts.com today they've posted a new tutorial showing you how to combine two powerful (and popular) technologies to make a customer management application - Laravel and AngularJs. This is the first part of a series and focuses on the backend work in Laravel.

When creating a single-page app we should use some kind of framework to do some of the job for us, so we can focus on the actual functionality. AngularJS fits here perfectly, because features like dynamic dependency injection and bi-directional data binding are just great. Sometimes we also require some kind of server. If you’ve chosen PHP then Laravel may be your best option, as it’s easy to work with and pretty powerful.

They assume that you'll already have an instance of Laravel all set up and that you'll have access to a MySQL server for a database. Other than that, they provide all of the code you'll need to get the server side up and running. The application stories simple data about customers and transactions and walks you through making models and controllers for each.

Eirik Hoem has posted a tip for all of the PHP SOAP developers out there - a method for setting the xsi:type correctly for objects sent in the message.

I spent quite some time looking for info on how to specify the xsi:type for the objects, and I finally came across SoapVar. I created a base class which the SOAP classes extended. A method called pack is responsible for setting xsi:type.

In his example, he creates a BaseClass to work from and builds a createCustomer class on top of it, defining a setCustomer function inside. When the new Person is created, a new Customer is too complete with the correctly formatted type on the object.