Creating immutable objects in PHP

You may have seen the \DateTimeImmutable class being used, and wondered why is this different from the \DateTime class? I guess it’s the same…but immutable, right? Why would I want to use an immutable object? Here’s a brief overview. ...

27 January, 2019

Move from Laravel 5.4 to Symfony 4

Hello from Symfony 4! Today I finished the move from Laravel to Symfony 4. The content and design hasn’t moved, but the entire backend has been rewritten using Symfony 4. I’ve managed to keep the content online for well over 10 years, and it’s been running on various versions of Drupal (5, 6, and 7) after being completely rewritten and migrated to Laravel a couple of years ago. A few months ago, I decided to rewrite it again, this time in Symfony....

20 February, 2018

CodeIgniter vs. Laravel

It’s not always easy to give a definite winner with these sorts of comparisons, as depends what your requirements and preferences are. So, here are a few areas worth thinking about when weighing up CodeIgniter against Laravel. ...

8 March, 2016

Outlook for Mac 2011 not working on OS X El Capitan (10.11)

tl;dr - If you use Outlook for Mac and you’re thinking of upgrading to OS X El Capitain, don’t…yet! Edit (Fix): There is an update available now that fixes this problem. You can install it by opening Word, clicking ‘Help’ in the menu bar then clicking ‘Check for updates’. You should see the critical update available. Download, install it, and enjoy Outlook 2011 on your El Capitan Mac :) For more information, visit: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3098229 It’s been an eventful day, for all the wrong reasons. Usually my Apple updates go well, but today I discovered that if you try and sync Outlook (running on El Capitan) with an Exchange server, you get a (nice, redesigned) beachball. This is a known bug (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3098396), and the official workaround at the moment is to stick to using Yosemite. ...

1 October, 2015

Getting Laravel Homestead to work with larger file uploads

I’ve been working on a Laravel project which uses relatively large file uploads (about 30MB - 120MB). My development environment is Laravel Homestead - a great, pre-packaged Vagrant box for Laravel development. If you haven’t heard of this I highly recommend you check it out - it’s a great way to get up and running with Laravel, but it doesn’t seem to play well for larger file uploads through forms (over about 5MB). My forms were either hanging or returning an nginx ’too large’ error. Here are some of the settings which I’ve had to tweak to get Homestead working nicely with larger uploads. ...

12 January, 2015