Random values play an important role in many PHP applications, and many libraries and frameworks rely on them for generating tokens, salts, and as input for functions. This article gives you an overview of what random values are used for and why they’re important, and peeks under the hood of how they’re generated.

You have an account with a shipping service and you’ve checked out their API, but it looks pretty complex. And If you hard code your site to use the API, you’ll be up for a lot of work if you change shippers. This article focuses on how build a plugin-based library for different shippers (such as FedEx, UPS, or USPS) so you can access arbitrary services with only negligible, if any, code changes to your application.

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.

If you’re an avid feed consumer, you might be a bit sad to see Google’s recent announcement of Reader reaching end of life. Reader was simple and easy to use, but there’s no reason you can’t have the same functionality with your own homegrown project. The PHP library SimplePie allows for quick and easy feed consumption and display. See how you can get started writing your very own feed reader.

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!

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.

Projects are slippery, unruly beasts! In a previous project management article it was mentioned you should use an Agile methodology, particularly Scrum, to help tame them. This article follows up by looking a bit closer at Scrum, hopefully enticing you to start using it to manage your projects if you aren’t already.

A one-time URL is a specially crafted address that is valid for one use only. It’s usually provided to a user to gain privileged access to a file for a limited time or as part of a particular activity, such as user account validation. In this article you’ll see how to generate, implement, and expire one-time URLs.

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.

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.