It’s been a while since my first post about Laravel, I’ve learnt a lot recently (mostly from Laracasts and Dayle Rees) but yesterday stumbled on a real problem with how the project was setup, so thought I’d cover here what I did to fix it.

I’ve been itching to learn a new language or new “something” for ages, normally client work gets in the way and I end up focussing on that. I’ve been fortunate enough to come off the end of a group of projects in recent days and due to the impending arrival of child number 2 haven’t taken any new ones on, perfect timing for tinkering.

We recently purchased Gravity Forms for doing some client projects and it’s fantastic… I thought I’d got everything I need but there was one thing it didn’t do that really surprised me, in the notification emails there was no way of getting the exact time the submission button was hit! This really surprised me, this seems like one of the most obvious things you’d want to know. Support were fantastic and answered my query in just a few minutes, it has to be done with a hook (this still surprises me!), so here you go: First create a hidden field in your form, we’ll use a hook to fill this in after submission. Add the following to your functions.php function… Continue reading »

I apologise now if I put off some of the more general readers with this post, but I’ve struck upon a bit a problem! I have some automated code that I wrote using PHP and Curl, that retrieves a mountain of information from a website, does some statistical analysis on it and then presents me with a nice little report (having inserted the data into a MySQL database). It’s wonderful – to do the process manually would take maybe 2-3 hours every day, as it is I wake up to a nice report sat in my inbox everyday with all the information in it. Now I have a problem, the website that I crawl to get this information is converting… Continue reading »

It appears the CakeBaker, may renew my interest in CakePHP having highlighted some projects that use CakePHP. Island Cruises looks fantastic! Dishola, looks very tempting! PokerInside, could be onto a winner! So, you obviously can do more than just make a notes application with CakePHP, now it’s just a case of what I do with it?!

I’ve long been interested in some rapid development PHP framework to speed up my development time, I’m well aware that starting to use one could slow me up in the interim, but once I was fully up to speed with any of the major frameworks I would probably find it very easy. So I dug my head into the cakePHP manual today, I’ll be honest I found the manual heavy going, but I’ve always felt like that about any programming language, it’s far easier to learn by example, SitePoint have a Tutorial that gives you a real first bite. I found the example really easy, but then it’s an example and you’re supposed to! Technorati has little on CakePHP, other… Continue reading »