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As Xdebug has been removed from the default Homestead box you now need to install it manually to be able to use it. Once you have vagrant ssh-ed to your Homestead VM the first thing you need to do it download the latest compatible version of Xdebug (2.4.0RC3 at the time of writing) and build…

For pretty much five years running now I’ve taken time at the end of the year to reflect on the year that’s been, and look ahead to the year that’s to come. Last year I wanted to continue to work smarter, not harder and strike a better balance of “busyness” in my life. While I’m…

Back in the summer I sold one of my small SAAS apps that had around 100 paying customers. After trying a few private channels someone recommended I try selling the app through a broker. I had sold a few apps on Flippa before but nothing of this value and I wanted to see if I…

Continuous integration testing is awesome and if you build software with a team you really should have it up and running. Travis CI is a free (for public repos) service which connects to your GitHub repositories and automatically runs your tests whenever someone pushes to your repo (all configurable of course). This means you can…

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about WordPress and Composer (see my recent series on using WordPress with Git & Composer over on Delicious Brains) and how WordPress might implement dependency management at the core level. As more and more plugin developers start making use of Composer to manage their plugin dependencies this is going…

In this tutorial we look at automating Grunt tasks (so you don’t have to re-run grunt all the time) using the “watch” task.

In this tutorial we look at setting up and Gruntfile and installing a SASS package to compile our style.scss file.

For a while now I’ve been wanting to be better at “sharing everything I know”. I’ve also been wanting to start doing video tutorial series. So today I’m launching the Build The Web YouTube channel (as a partner to the Build The Web Newsletter) which combines these two goals. I decided to start with something…

It’s great to finally be able to announce that my wife and I are expecting a wee bundle of joy in March next year. It’s been a bit of a long road for us with many trials along the way. So to be here now, able to announce this great news, is truly a blessing.…

This one tripped me up recently. Say you are wanting to test a bit of code using PHPunit that relies on a defined constant. You don’t want the define() to affect your other tests, you only want it to apply for this specific test. Something like this: class MyTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase { public function testExample()…