Welcome to the blog

Here, you'll find articles and tutorials to help you and your team grow your software testing, deployment, and documentation skills, posted on a regular basis.

Mon, Oct 22, 2012

Make Freelance Business Administration Easy - Use FreeAgent

Whether you’re a casual freelance php developer or running a professional freelance business, you’ll know just how much work can be involved. Not only do you have applications to design, develop and support. But you’ve also got business functions such as marketing, advertising, finances and networking as well. In this post we show you a tool to massively reduce your workload - FreeAgent.

Mon, Oct 15, 2012

Shifting Direction (Slightly)

So many of us are great technically, but find the prospect of running a freelance business anything from difficult to down right scary. So we’re aiming for Malt Blue to become a key resource for Starting, Building and Growing a Successful PHP Freelance Business.

Thu, Aug 23, 2012

Ship-It - Even if it Sucks!

Whether it’s The Cloud, Mobile Development, HTML5, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Search, Big Data, Queuing or more, we know there’s a wealth of possibility of what we can do. But we then seem to combine that with a misplaced, seemingly schizophrenic, need to be able to do it all and then not ship it until it’s perfect Today we discuss the Ship-It! attitude

Wed, Aug 8, 2012

How to Use the Zend Form ViewScript Decorator In All Modules

If you’ve been using Zend Forms for any length of time, you’ll know just how flexible and configurable they are. There’s not much that you can’t do with them, But it’s not always easy and there are catches. Today we look at ensuring that module-based Zend Forms using the ViewScript decorator can always be initialised no matter what.

Wed, Aug 1, 2012

How PostgreSQL Check Constraints Reduce Your Development Time

In the comments around the last post here on Malt Blue, why Kohana is an excellent alternative to the Zend Framework, which received quite a bit of attention socially as well, there was a bit of attention focused on the database layer. Specifically: Lubos said: Very similar to Kohana is Yii, however it offers significantly more robust functionalities - ORM based on PDO supports 5 RDBMS, web2 widgets based on JQuery UI, built-in support for integration with 3rd party libraries.

Fri, Jul 20, 2012

Why Kohana is an Excellent Alternative to Zend Framework

As you know from reading Malt Blue, I’m rather a Zend Framework fan. Whether it’s the controller plugins, easily adding RSS feeds to applications, configuration with Zend Config or more – I really believe it’s one of the best PHP framework choices. But well, it’s a bit heavyweight. Enter Kohana!

Wed, Jul 11, 2012

Zend Framework - How To Implement RSS Feeds the Easy Way

Ever wanted to know how to take an existing Zend Framework application where you have posts, records, news or anything else stored in a data source and updated regularly, and make it available as a feed for your users that they can subscribe to?

Thu, Jul 5, 2012

Why Zend Framework Plugins Save You Time

During the recent development of the new PHP cloud development casts site, which has been developed with the Zend Framework, so much development time has been saved by using one of the simplest and arguably best features of the framework: Controller Plugins. So today I want to introduce you to them and walk you through a working plugin so you can see just how effective and efficient they can make your development workflow.


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