PHPMaster has only been live for a couple of months now, but its reception has been phenomenal! I like to think the reason is three-fold. First, SitePoint has the amazing ability to get the word out on Twitter and Facebook, with the TechTimes newsletter, etc. Second, developers are hungry for fresh PHP content. The Internet never forgets as the saying goes, but the art of web programming advances at such a rapid pace that maybe it should; there’s a lot of stale content and it can be difficult sometimes to find current articles and posts worth reading. PHPMaster brings relevant, fresh content to you all conveniently gathered in one place – it’s “one-stop-shopping” for everything you need to become a better developer! Third, and maybe I’m just biased, our exclusive content is awesome! In the past handful of weeks I’ve been privileged to help contributing authors polish their articles into amazing masterpieces.

As managing editor, each article that comes across my screen becomes a bit like a child to me – I help the author nurture it and watch it grow from a baby idea to a mature, “responsible adult” article. A good parent shouldn’t pick favorites, but a parent likes to brag too and my counterparts in Melbourne won’t give me the space to brag about each one individually (something about word count, reader attention span, blah blah blah, all that stuff a bragging parent doesn’t care about). So begging your understanding and at the risk of playing favorites, I’d like to highlight three awesome articles we’ve published here at PHPMaster that really stand out in my mind.

Generating Invoices with Zend_Pdf by Ahmed Shreef
If you want to provide your users with printable invoices, event tickets, and other such documents, you’ll most likely want to generate them as PDFs. Ahmed’s article shows you how to generate a PDF invoice on the fly using the Zend_Pdf component of the Zend Framework. What I like most about this article is his approach. Most of the introductory articles I’ve seen covering PDF generation talk about drawing lines and shapes; but in the real-world, preparing a template and using it as the basis for the invoice is easier, faster, and smarter than programmatically drawing each detail of the invoice. It’s less work for you as the developer, and faster to render for your users.

Introduction to PHP Arrays by J Armando Jeronymo
Armando’s article covering arrays in PHP is geared toward the novice programmer. Many developers don’t come to PHP with a background in Computer Science as those working with other languages might. Often times we’re self-taught, having been thrown into it at work, and come to PHP as the next step from HTML. But arrays are such an important and versatile data structure, and his article underscores the fact there’s something accessible for everyone at PHPMaster, regardless of your current skill-level. (Plus, I got to create the tag hamburger!)

Understanding OAuth – Tweeting from Scratch by Dustin Runnells
This two-part series demonstrates how OAuth v1 works by explaining the process of connecting a PHP application to the Twitter API using only a few built-in functions to post a tweet. Dustin acknowledges that any real-world development would probably take advantage of an existing OAuth library, but using a library doesn’t erase the need to understand what’s actually going on. His goal is to give you a better understanding of how OAuth works so you’ll be better equipped to troubleshoot any problems that may arise. In doing so he also gives you a brief glimpse into the Twitter API, something that’s useful as the web grows ever more inter-connected through social media.

I wish I could talk about all the articles – Preventing Cross-Site Request Forgeries by Martin Psinas, Why You Should Use Bcrypt to Hash Stored Passwords by Callum Hopkins, Regular Expressions by Jason Pasnikowski, … they’re all great! Be sure to check the rest of the articles at PHPMaster, and keep visiting for more awesome articles to come. And if you’d like to share your own experiences and perspective with the community by writing exclusive content for us, feel free to get in touch!

Image via Svetlana Larina / Shutterstock