Articles

 Question

What does the following code print out?

function arrayPrint($array)
{
   echo implode(' ', $array);
}

$arrayA = [1, 2, 3];
$arrayB = $arrayA;
$arrayB[1] = 0;
arrayPrint($arrayA);

Godot is a great game engine and I've been looking for projects to help me expand my knowledge of the platform. After fiddling with drawing shapes and getting used to the interface I decided to create a text adventure game.

Text adventures used to be really popular in the early days of games, before graphical adventures were possible on the hardware available. I can remember playing a couple of adventure games in the late 80s and even playing some simple multi user dungeons (MUDs) in the 90s so text adventure games do have a hint of nostalgia for me.

There are a number of different tools that allow you to validate and test a Drupal site. Inspecting your custom code allows you to adhere to coding standards and ensure that you stamp our common coding problems. Adding tests allows you to make certain that the functionality of your Drupal site works correctly.

If you have tests in your Drupal project then you ideally need to be running them at some point in your development workflow. Getting GitHub to run the tests when you push code or create a pull request means that you can have peace of mind that your test suite is being run at some point in workflow. You also want to allow your tests to be run locally with ease, without having to remember lots of command line arguments.

In this article I will show how to set up validation and tests against a Drupal site and how to get GitHub to run these steps when you create a pull request. This assumes you have a Drupal 10 project that is controlled via composer.

This year's DrupalCon Europe was hosted between the 17th and 20th of October, in the French city of Lille. My DrupalCon adventure began early on Monday morning when Chris Maiden picked me up to drive to France via the EuroStar train. We arrived in Lille a little after 4pm, which was really good going for a nearly 400+ mile trip.

DrupalCon Lillie was a first for me as I was there representing Code Enigma, who had sponsored the event and organised a booth (well, a table). The booth wasn't so that we could sell anything, it was more more because we wanted to support Drupal and the sponsorship came with a booth. Driving to Lille allowed us to fill the car with 200 coffee cups, which we gave out at the event.

Using frameworks to handle the authentication of your PHP application is perfectly fine to do, and normally encouraged. They abstract away all of the complexity of managing users and sessions that need to work in order to allow your application to function.

That said, it is important to take a step back and understand how authentication works in PHP. This allows you to more accurately debug problems with framework authentication systems that you make common use of.

Creating an authentication system using PHP is pretty simple since PHP has many of the features and functions built in. In fact, frameworks will simply wrap this feature set into a coherent authentication model that can be expanded to introduce new features.

In this article I will go through the steps required to create an authentication system using PHP and MariaDB. I will assume you have some knowledge of PHP, but that you want to know more about how to authenticate users.

I've been doing some research into mechanical keyboards recently and I've realised that re-built keyboards are not the only keyboards available. You can buy keyboard kits from companies that contain all the needed components for you to put together your dream keyboard.

Most of these kits involve the use of a soldering iron to solder the components to the circuit board (aka PCB). Since my soldering experience is minimal (at best) I decided that I would look for something cheap that I could have a go at before embarking on something more serious.

A sparkline is a very small line graph that is intended to convey some simple information, usually in terms of a numeric value over time. They tend to lack axes or other labels and are added to information readouts in order to expand on numbers in order to give them more context.

Sparklines tend to be around 20-30 pixels height and up to 150-200 pixels wide. The are generally best when you want to show between 5 and 15 items as adding more items to such a small graph can make things a little messy.

Drupal's modular system allows for all kinds of additions to be added to your site through plugins, entities and configuration.

Thanks to Drupal's modular configuration system you can also inject custom configuration into existing configuration entities. This allows you to extend the functionality of an existing entity and ensure that any customisation are saved in the system configuration. Any configuration entity can be augmented without changing the existing configuration schema of the entity, which might cause knock on effects to other modules.

The Group module in Drupal is a powerful way of collecting together users and content under a single entity. These arbitrary collections of entities in a Drupal site can be used for editor teams within your site or company subscriptions where users can manage themselves, or anything that requires groups of users to be created.

During a recent project that used the Group module I found myself digging deeper into the Groups permissions system in order to achieve certain tasks. This is a similar permission system to that already created in Drupal, with the exception that the permission always forms a link between a Group and a user, and an optional additional entity. Permissions being local to the group is useful if you want to create groups of users that had access to pages and other entities that are kept within the group.

I read The Daily WTF every now and then and one story about bad logging code in PHP stood out to me. The post looked at some PHP code that was created to log a string to a file, but would have progressively slowed down the application every time a log was generated.

PHP is a great language as it allows you to put together code without easily shooting yourself in the foot. One downside of this ease of access is that it can allow beginners to put together code that works, but will ultimately cause problems in the long run. The PHP code given in the post is certainly an example of this.

I know that the goal of The Daily WTF isn't to fix problems found in code and is more of a satirical look at bad coding examples. I thought, however, that it would be good to look at the code and fix the issues it had.