Things to know about...

Every now and then I stumble across a cool project or tool that I instantly want to tell all my colleagues about. This list below is a history of such things so I can keep everything in one place, it may as well be of use to someone!

• mockery - I never start a php project without including Mockery as a mandatory dev dependency. It offers fantastic mocking functionality and is heaps easier to use that PHPUnit built in library;

• pirum - great tool to quickly start and manage a PEAR channel + clever instruction on how to leverage github’s gh-pages functionality to host your PEAR channel;

• sami - documentation generator, way better than the good ‘ol phpDoc;

• vagrant - ‘abstraction’ layer for VM management, top way to quickly create dev VMs;

• faker - dummy test data quickly, or how I read it once ‘the ultimate lorem ipsum for PHP’;

• behat and mink - BDD for PHP, definitely one to know and use;

• slim - my favorite ‘quick-fix’ framework, best solution when I need to mock somethign up quickly.

To investigate:

• plates - native php templating as an alternative to compiled twig;

• docker - vagrant idea taken further by the use of linux containers;

• codeception - testing framework that provides support for unit, functional and acceptance testing.

Watch this space for further updates…