You’ve created an awesome library, and now you’re ready to open source it and share it with the world. The modern way is increasingly becoming through Composer and Packagist. In this article you’ll learn what information is needed in your composer.json file and how to list your library on Packagist so others can easily find it.

Learn how counting systems are structured, how to convert between various number system, and how to use binary operators in PHP. After reading it, you’ll be able to incorporate functionality that relies on these seemingly tricky concepts in your scripts with ease!

Not every application needs to be written using a framework, But if you’ve decided that yours does then it’s beneficial to compare your needs against the features and benefits of the various offerings. It may be a framework you’re already familiar with, or it may be a new one, but only through objective analysis can you be certain it’s truly the best fit. Asking yourself these six questions will help you intelligently whittle down your options.

Slim that offers routing capabilities for easily creating small PHP applications. An interesting, and powerful, feature is its concept of Middleware. Slim middleware can be written that wraps the application, and has access to and can affect the app’s environment and request and response objects in a chained manner. Middleware is an eloquent solution for implementing various aspects of a Slim app. See how Slim middleware works and how you can implement your own custom filter-like services.

The start of the new year is often a time for resolutions, like eat healthy and lose weight, learn to play a musical instrument, learn a foreign language, etc. This year, why not make a practical resolution: write for PHPMaster!

Break out the candy corn and apple cider; it’s that time of year again! The rest of the world may not celebrate Halloween as hog wild as in America, but I thought it’d be fun to share some spooky PHP stuff to mark the holiday. See some scary (but logical) behavior found in PHP itself, and spooky (and possibly quite illogical) ways in which some have twisted PHP to do their bidding.

Those working in a Windows environment are more likely to download and install PHP from precompiled packages rather than compile from source. Compiling can be a frustrating task, especially on Windows! But hopefully this article will be your first step in overcoming many of the obstacles. Learn how to ensure your build environment is set up correctly, compile PHP, and both static and dynamic PHP extensions.

The Windows Registry is a hierarchically structured database in which the Windows operating system and other applications store important configuration information. All sorts of data is stored in the registry: user profiles, file-type associations, hardware information, serial numbers, and more. Learn how your Windows-based PHP applications can access the Windows registry with functions made available from the win32std PHP extension.

Security has been the talk at the water cooler lately after a flood of recent attacks were successful in obtaining password information from several high-profile web properties. The unfortunate truth of the matter is there’s no excuse for these leaks; they would not have been possible if simple, well-known security precautions were taken. Read some of the security-focused articles PHPMaster has published throughout the year and apply these best practices to protect yourself and your code today!

“X PHP Snippets” articles abound on the Internet, so why another one? Let’s face it… the PHP code in them are generally lame at best. Instead, this list presents five snippets you’ll no doubt find interesting and useful. The creativity in these samples are sure to inspire you to write better and more creative code in your own day-to-day endeavors.