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A while back I had written two blog posts about setting up an Apache, MySQL and multiple, simultaneous PHP versions environment for macOS -or Linux, same concept- and for Windows. In the meantime HTTPS has been promoted to a near necessity and so being able to build and test a site on HTTPS is very desirable. Well, as it turns out, it’s perfectly possible too!

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Amazon Web Services secured with Let's Encrypt SSL certificates

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a wealth of services for site owners. A service I particularly enjoy is the inexpensive CloudFront CDN which lets me deliver static content, like downloads and update information for my software, very fast to people across the world. What became apparent is that while it was fast and cheap, it wasn't the most secure solution. Anyone could forge the update response and mislead my users to downloading a modified package full of malware. The solution was to use an SSL certificate with the CDN, ensuring the integrity of the downloads and update information. For this purpose I used Let's Encrypt™ which allows you to create properly singed SSL certificates for free. The process is non-obvious so I'm documenting this for you.

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I regularly have the need to try things out on Linux. Sometimes a virtual machine won't cut it for me typically due to memory, disk and performance limitations. Moreover, a decent, up-to-date, bootable Linux environment is a great backup in case all of my other computers are broken, infected or stolen. That entails having the Linux installation on an external, USB-attached hard disk drive which can boot with relative ease on any UEFI-enabled PC (driver compatibility notwithstanding). Moreover, all the preparatory work has to be performed using a single-boot Windows computer without ending up having a dual boot system. It sounds tough. It is tough, but I'm writing this from my portable Ubuntu Linux installation running off a USB-attached SSD!

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If you want to use SSH or SFTP with PHP you need the SSH2 extension. Unfortunately MAMP doesn't come with it out of the box. Last year I had written about how to add the SSH2 extension to MAMP, on PHP 5.6. In the meantime two major changes ocurred which pretty much nullified the process: OS X El Capitan was released requiring new prerequisites to be installed and PHP 7 was included which requires an entirely new approach to installing SSH2 (it's no longer as simple as using pecl). In this article we'll discuss the process required to get the SSH2 extension installed on PHP7 in MAMP.

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Has your Mac's Bluetooth stopped responding or got stuck in the Off position? Do you have work to do and cannot afford a reboot?

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If you want to use SSH or SFTP with PHP you need the SSH2 extension. Unfortunately MAMP doesn't come with it out of the box. Moreover, it comes with no PHP sources making it a bit complicated to use pecl to install the extension. So here I document it, mostly for my future self and in the hope that I'll spare a poor soul the trouble. The middle part of the instructions is a prerequisite for installing any other PHP extension, so here's another utility to this.

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If you want to start developing PHP applications, or merely work on your PHP-based site off-line, on Mac OS X you can easily do so. In this how-to we'll see how you can set up NginX, a high performance web server, with the PHP version shipped with Mac OS X itself to create a local web server. In case you're wondering, you can of course use it in parallel with MAMP, XAMPP or even the multi-PHP version server I've described in an earlier post.

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In the previous two installments of this series we discussed the target audience for Joomla! 4 and beyond and the vision for the end user. In this third installment we'll see things from the developers' perspective, defining a vision for the PHP code's architecture and design goals.

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In the first post of this series we explored the unified marketing message for Joomla! 4 and beyond. Armed with this result let's see how we can turn this into an actionable vision, starting with the improvements that affect our end users. The common theme behind all the improvements in this vision can be summed up as "Don't make them think".

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Over the last year I've collected my thoughts on Joomla! the CMS, the project and the community. We've finally all come to the conclusion that Joomla! needs a revamp. The time is ripe to discuss the future. This is a very big subject so I'm going to present this as a series of blog posts. In this first installment we'll talk about Joomla!'s target audience and a unified marketing message to frame our vision.

  1. The problem is the vision
  2. Book review: Programming Joomla! Plugins
  3. Debugging Joomla! email sending on a local server (Mac OS X)
  4. Apple display brightness controls in Ubuntu Desktop
  5. Installing Joomla! extensions from the command line
  6. Refactoring Joomla!
  7. You thought that discounts drive more clients to your shop?
  8. Apache, MySQL, PHP server on Mac OS X with multiple, simultaneous PHP versions
  9. Apache, MySQL, PHP server on Windows with multiple, simultaneous PHP versions
  10. How I transferred a 7Gb site with 15' of downtime
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