Design patterns standardize common solutions for the problems we face in developing complex software. One such problem is managing a complex series of actions in a workflow. The Facade pattern helps hide the complexity to expose a clean, neat API. See exactly what Facade is and how it helps us write good code.

The ability to create extensible templates allows us to reuse templates and features in multiple places throughout our applications when necessary, and Twig is one of best templating libraries when it comes to support for for extending the core library’s functionality. Learn how to extend your Twig templates using template inheritance, functions, and filters.

Multi-language support, also known as internationalization, is a key feature of modern web applications. Most of the full-stack PHP frameworks come with multi-language support which enables us to dynamically present our application’s interface in different languages without duplicating the existing source code for each language. See how you can enable multiple languages using CodeIgniter.

We cannot prevent change. You may think that your system is designed perfectly to cater to all of its requirements, but there will always be a change request that ruins your perfect design. The Adapter pattern is a design pattern which is commonly used to manage changes in development, and in this article you’ll see its usage to minimize the impact of changes and how you can benefit from it.

Opauth is an open source library created to standardize the authentication process among various service providers. This article explores how to effectively use Opauth to standardize your authentication strategy. Its discussed in the context of CodeIgniter here, but once you understand the necessary details for integration then adapting to any framework is super simple.

Testing is an iterative part of the development process that we carry out to ensure the quality of our code. Actual data for our application comes in when we release it to production, but during the development process we need fake data similar enough to real data for testing purposes. The popular open source library Faker provides us with the ability to generate different data suitable for a wide range of scenarios.

Managing dependencies can be one of the most difficult tasks in web app development. We can use Dependency Injection, but that comes with its own hassles though, which Pimple solves by providing a lightweight container for creating and storing object dependencies in a DRY manner. In this article we’ll look at the problems with hard-coding dependencies, how dependency injection solves them, and how to use Pimple to keep code that takes advantage of dependency injection more maintainable.

Templating is crucial for separating your business logic from your presentation, but if your web app depends heavily on Ajax, it can be difficult to maintain both server and client-side templates without duplication. It can be useful to choose a templating engine which provides both client and server-side support allowing maximum reusability. Learn how to share your templates between PHP and JavaScript using Mustache.

This is part 2 of the two-part series covering PHP’s IMAP library. In this part, learn how to work with mailbox folders, reading email, and working with message attachments.

Some web applications might require features of an email client to be made available the users. In these situations, we can either write our own or customize one of many opensource clients. Regardless of your choice, knowledge of working with IMAP mail is helpful. In this two-part series you’ll learn how to work with PHP’s IMAP extension. This part discusses the necessary functions for connecting to mail servers and reading messages.