Yii - is one of my favorite frameworks. I've done a few projects using this framework and have been always satisfied with its functionality, flexibility, performance and community support. This post starts a series of "how to" articles where I will give some tips, advises and best practices.

If you need to use optional parameters in URLs here is how you can do it in UrlManager:

Are you a web developer or/and web site owner? Then you definitely have shopped around for a website hosting!

Unlike 90s and beginning of 2000s when Yahoo! GeoCities was pretty much the only choice, today, there are a lot of choices for web developers: shared web hosting, virtual private servers, and dedicated servers.

So, which Hosting is right for You? Let's compare the 3 main types of hosting.

We all use mobile devices every day. Well, at least most of us. All those smartphones, tablets, gadget-watches, etc. Most of us cannot imagine life without these things. Of course, these devices are used a lot to access the Internet. Howerver, not all websites will look the same on different screens. In fact, a lot of websites will look really bad on smaller screens. I'd even say most of web sites!

In the modern web design there is very common dilemma whether to create mobile standalone website, or create responsive design. As usual each option has its pros and cons. In this article I will look at both options and show a sort of comparison.

Comparison

Thanks to nightbloos I can continue posting funny code samples that developers meet/write from time to time. :)

Here is another good example of how NOT to do! Please, do not try this at home! This stunt was performed by untrained professionals.  :)

<?php
$forReplace = array(",","."," ","-", "+", "#""/");
foreach($forReplace as $repl){
	$find = str_replace($repl,'',$find)
}

Obviously, in this case a regular expression function must have been used.

If you have another good examples of a funny code samples, please leave it in the comments. ;)

Most of web developers from time to time buy domain names. But not all web developers know what can be behind that process and what unexpected problems may appear suddenly.

There is plenty of domain name registars like Go Daddy, Enom, 1nd1, etc. Each registar has its pros and cons. Sometimes a domain owner can face a very sudden problem. Unfortunately, this "problem" could have been known if domain buyers read Terms and Conditions carefully before they buy domains. Registars have a lot little "surprises" buried in the fine print of a registrars' "Terms of Service".

I heard a story from one of my collegues that a registar requested a 200$ fee to unblock my collegue's domain name after it was blocked based on a anonymous request! The registar didn't even try to contact the domain owner and understand the nature of the problem. They simply said "Pay us money!". It looks like a virtual extortion.

Some exciting and promising coming changes in PHP 6 or 7 have been anounced recently by Dmitry Stogov from Zend. A detailed article has been postd here http://news.php.net/php.internals/73888. 

Briefly, Zend is working on PHP NG (next generation) which will bring better performance and better memory management. According to Dmitry, the PHP application execution typically takes a significant part of the execution time dealing with memory allocations, and that affects PHP performance significantly as well.

I spent a significant amount of time experimenting with JIT, and even created a PoC of transparent LLVM based JIT compiler embedded into OPCache. The results on bench.php was just amazing – (0.219 seconds against 2.175 – *10 times speedup of PHP 5.5*), but on real-life apps we got just few percent speedup., - says Dmitry in his report.

According to his tests PHP developers can gain up to 20% more requests per second (in case with Wordpress for example).

So far it looks like upgrading to PHP NG should be painless (that's the idea). However, some of PHP extensions wil might require some "massage".

Looking forward to test the new PHP 6. Or maybe 7? ;)