General Discussion

Topics that talk about general programming principles

NULL is Legit When Used Correctly

I was doing some research on a topic about compulsory parameters to constuctors for a project I was doing when I came across a topic about the use of NULL as a return value. Don't ask me how I stumble into these things. As you can imagine, as with everything in software engineering circles, there was a raging debate about whether or not NULL (or its equivalents like None in ...

Loading Gravity Forms from a Database

If you are a developer that has been working with the Gravity Form plugin, you undoubtedly have run across the need to load a form based on a row from the database. Finding documentation on how exactly to go about doing this is very sparse. Unless you have reasoned it out well, you are probably pulling your hair right about now and are at a standstill. In this blog post ...

Generating JSON Web Tokens (JWT) in Java or PHP

JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) are a mechanism for authentication that is simple to setup and easy to use. However, most of the time when you encounter this topic in a project, you get the advice to just use a JWT package. I am not quite sure why given that creating a token is relatively straight forward if you know how they are built. You can also implement such logic in ...

WordPress in the Enterprise – Establishing Services

To continue our theme of making WordPress your next enterprise deployment (Check out our two previous articles... WordPress In The Enterprise – Building In A Class Library and WordPress In The Enterprise – The Functions File) we will talk about how we can go about organizing your code so that it can have "bolt on services". WordPress has a ton of extensibility capabilities which make it ideal for plugins and ...

Top 10 Tips for PHP Programmers

I thought that it was time for me to give a few helpful tips to those PHP wizards out there on how to write better scripts. I wanted to provide some tips that are a bit different than what you may have read on other blogs or seen in other articles on the subject. While some of these tips are universal (and thus you may have seen already), I am ...

A Brief Overview of Honey Pot Form Fields

What is a honey pot field? Honey pot fields are HTML form fields that you put into your forms designed to catch bots (automated scripts that fill in forms attempting to spam). These fields are put in so that bots see them but humans do not. Perhaps the field is put into the form but hidden from normal users using a CSS style like "display: none;" or "visibility: hidden;". Since most ...