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Get Country Code in PHP, with PHP Countries

By Jordan Hall 14th February 2018


Country information is used so frequently in modern web development. This is especially true in customer relationship managements systems and e-commerce websites. Since we do a lot of e-commerce and CRM development here at Rapid Web Services, we developed an open source library to easily retrieve country information. The rest of this post will detail how you can use this library, PHP Countries, and what it is capable of. Installation To inst...

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Get UK Bank Holidays in PHP

By Jordan Hall 3rd November 2017


If you've ever needed to display opening times for a business on their website you'll probably have encountered the edge case of differing opening times on UK Bank Holidays. The UK government provides information regarding all UK Bank Holidays, and we've written a small open-source PHP library to take advantage of this. Installation You can install the PHP UK Bank Holidays package using Composer. If you've never used Composer before, you can fi...

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How to migrate data from one database to another (with UXDM)

By Jordan Hall 17th August 2017


This article is aimed at developers looking to migrate existing data from one database schema to another. It should be very useful if you are planning to move from one system to another, such as moving from Drupal to WordPress, or wishing to migrate external data into a new bespoke system. The UXDM (Universal Extensible Data Migrator) is an open source PHP library we have created to simplify the process of moving data from any source to any dest...

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Testing In Laravel Part 2

By Andrew McDonald 10th May 2017


In my last post, Testing In Laravel, I spoke about the importance of functionality testing during large scale projects and how we can achieve this via the tools that come packaged with Laravel. In that post I gave an example of a very simple Laravel test, where it will click a link and see if the page is redirected to a login page. In this part we will create a test for the actual submission of a form and test both an instance of a failure ...

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Rapid Web’s Open Source Contributions 2016 & 2017

By Jordan Hall 25th April 2017


At the beginning of last year, I posted about our open source contributions from 2015. Most of these projects focused on frontend web development. This time around, the majority of our new open sourced projects are backend code and libraries. They also include a small selection of 'Simple' libraries, designed to wrap around complex functionality and abstract it. Here's a summary of our main open source projects and contributions from 2016 &...

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Testing In Laravel

By Andrew McDonald 21st March 2017


The importance of functionality testing during large scale projects cannot be underestimated and is even more important while using version control. What happens if the lovely login process you have just completed suddenly stops working because another developer has inadvertently uploaded new functionality that, while not directly influencing your login process, has still caused it to break? One way to go about fixing this would be by testing ...

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Creating mail templates in WordPress and using Mailtrap to test and preview them

By David Foley 14th March 2017


If you're creating your own WordPress theme and you want to include functionality to enable users to send out emails, then you will need to set up a mail template. Before we get into creating a mail template, we need a way to test the mail functionality and a way to preview the created emails. Fortunately for us there's Mailtrap. Mailtrap is a fake SMTP server for development teams to test, view and share emails sent from the development a...

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Simple Stripe Payments Integration

By Jordan Hall 7th March 2017


To help developers easily implement the basics of Stripe into their website and quickly accept payments, we created the open source PHP library SimpleStripe. SimpleStripe SimpleStripe is a package that allows you to really quickly setup a payment form on a website and charge customers. As you probably guessed by its creative name, it makes use of the Stripe payments system. Although Stripe itself is already a very developer friendly ...

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Rapid Web’s Open Source Contributions 2015

By Jordan Hall 7th January 2016


In 2015, Rapid Web Services made a commitment to increase their contributions to the open source community. We therefore started several open source projects. This post will go over some of the most interesting open source contributions we made last year. Direct Share Buttons Including large amounts of external JavaScript and 3rd party code for all the various social media sites can be a pain. They can slow down the loading and rendering of you...

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Coding methods and principles (part 2)

By Mark Jones 8th June 2015


Real World Example In the previous article in this series, I spoke about dependency injection using cars and engines as an example. In this article I will show you a more practical example by showing you how easy it can be for your system to switch between different database ORMs (Eloquent and PDO in this example) without having to recode everywhere that interacts with the database. Just in case you're not sure what an ORM is, ORM stands for O...

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Benchmarking and optimising PHP web applications

By Jordan Hall 17th October 2014


With all Turing complete programming languages, there are many different ways of performing the same task. Be it sorting, searching, looping through a list, outputting content to the screen or to a file - they can all be accomplished by a variety of differnet methods. PHP is no different, therefore it is worth looking at the different ways in which tasks can be performed, and benchmarking their performance. This allows us, as developers, to id...

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Preventing namespace clashes in PHP

By Jordan Hall 26th July 2011


The PHP scope resolution operator in PHP is a useful feature when you need to access methods or variables within a static context. It can often be useful in reducing namespace conflicts. Especially when using custom code with off the shelf systems to avoid conflicting function redefinitions. There have been a few cases where previously defined function errors have cropped up when adding a pre made system to a custom developed application. This i...

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