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Some of the most useful PHP tools available for free, mostly (but by no means exclusively) in the form of open source software. This guide intends to help make finding useful PHP tools easier for beginners and save expert developers some time by helping them remember what they already know.
Plates
Plates is a native PHP template system that’s fast, easy to use and easy to extend. It’s inspired by the excellent Twig template engine and strives to bring modern template language functionality to native PHP templates. Plates is designed for developers who prefer to use native PHP templates over compiled template languages, such as Twig or Smarty. This template engine features:
- Native PHP templates, no new syntax to learn
- Plates is a template system, not a template language
- Plates encourages the use of existing PHP functions
- Increase code reuse with template layouts and inheritance
- Template folders for grouping templates into namespaces
- Data sharing across templates
- Preassign data to specific templates
- Built-in escaping helpers
- Easy to extend using functions and extensions
- Framework-agnostic, will work with any project
- Decoupled design makes templates easy to test
- Composer ready and PSR-2 compliant
The following snippet provides a preview of how the plates template engines syntax looks like:
<?php $this->layout('template', ['title' => 'User Profile']) ?>
<h1>Welcome!</h1>
<p>Hello <?=$this->e($name)?></p>
<h2>Friends</h2>
<ul>
<?php foreach($friends as $friend): ?>
<li>
<a href="/profile/<?=$this->e($friend->id)?>">
<?=$this->e($friend->name)?>
</a>
</li>
<?php endforeach ?>
</ul>
<?php if ($invitations): ?>
<h2>Invitations</h2>
<p>You have some friend invites!</p>
<?php endif ?>LARAVEL
The Laravel framework is open-sourced software with expressive, elegant syntax
Laravel is built with testing in mind. In fact, support for testing with PHPUnit is included out of the box, and a phpunit.xml file is already setup for your application. The framework also ships with convenient helper methods allowing you to expressively test your applications.
An ExampleTest.php file is provided in the tests directory. After installing a new Laravel application, simply run phpunit on the command line to run your tests.
PARSEDOWN
A Parsedown wrapper for Laravel to compile markdown to HTML. Parsedown is fast and supports GitHub flavored markdown.
Parsedown is a Markdown parser that developed with PHP to add your applications in the code. Being a fast and reliable, this parsedown has been transfered to GitHub.Markdown Extra extension is also offered by this tool that provides an additional features.Download Link: http://parsedown.org/
Source: PHP development solution blog
GUZZLE
Guzzle is a PHP HTTP client that makes it easy to send HTTP requests and trivial to integrate with web services.
- Simple interface for building query strings, POST requests, streaming large uploads, streaming large downloads, using HTTP cookies, uploading JSON data, etc…
- Can send both synchronous and asynchronous requests using the same interface.
- Uses PSR-7 interfaces for requests, responses, and streams. This allows you to utilize other PSR-7 compatible libraries with Guzzle.
- Abstracts away the underlying HTTP transport, allowing you to write environment and transport agnostic code; i.e., no hard dependency on cURL, PHP streams, sockets, or non-blocking event loops.
- Middleware system allows you to augment and compose client behavior.
Others Includes:
REQUESTS FOR PHP
Requests is a HTTP library written in PHP.
THE PRETTIFIER
Prettifier provides a great place for editing, formatting and syntax highlighting for some programming languages including CSS, HTML, XML, SQL, PHP, Perl and others.
GEOCODER PHP
Geocoder is a great library for building geo applications. It provides an abstraction layer for geocoding manipulations.
SLIM STARTER
Slim starter by Xsanisty is another excellent solution for bootstrapping advanced web applications.
MINK
Mink is a PHP Library which lets you test that your web apps interacts with the browser properly. It removes the API differences between the two types of browser emulators, giving you a more accurate testing environment.
FORP
Forp is a PHP profiler written in C. Forp is a lightweight PHP extension which provides the full call stack of your script, with CPU and memory usage, in a plain PHP Array or JSON output. forp is non intrusive and it provides PHP annotations to do its work.
AURA
Aura provides independent library packages for PHP 5.4+. These packages can be used alone, in concert with each other, or combined into a full-stack framework of their own.
PHPCHECKSTYLE
PHPCheckstyle is an open-source tool that helps PHP programmers adhere to certain coding conventions. The tool checks the input PHP source code and reports any violations against the given standards.
PHP MESS DETECTOR
PHP Mess Detector is an easy to configure, user-friendly front-end for the raw metrics that PHP Depend measures. It looks for several potential problems in your code, including possible bugs, suboptimal code, unused parameters, and more.
KOHANA
Kohana is an elegant, open source, and object oriented HMVC framework built using PHP5, by a team of volunteers. It aims to be swift, secure, and small.
SABBERWORM
A parser for CSS Files written in PHP. Sabberworm allows extraction of CSS files into a data structure, manipulation of said structure and output as (optimized) CSS.
NETTE
Nette Framework is a tool for PHP web development. It is designed to be as usable and as friendly as possible. It focuses on security and performance and is definitely one of the safest PHP frameworks.
PHP MARKDOWN
This is a library package that includes the PHP Markdown parser and its sibling PHP Markdown Extra with additional features. Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers.
YII 2
Yii 2 is a complete rewrite of its previous version Yii 1.1 which is one of the most popular PHP frameworks. Yii is a high-performance PHP framework best for developing Web 2.0 applications.
PHP SANDBOX
PHP Sandbox utilizes PHPParser to prevent sandboxed code from running unsafe code. It utilizes FunctionParser to disassemble callables passed to the sandbox, so that PHP callables can also be run in sandboxes without first converting them into strings.
BELT
Belt is a collection of useful tools for PHP developers. It offers over 60 useful functions.
ICON GENERATOR FOR PHP
Icon generator lets you generate initial based icons with a colored background similar to Gmail’s.
HOA
Hoa is a set of PHP libraries that help to create a bridge between industrial and research worlds.
PHP-CPP
The PHP-CPP library is a C++ library for developing PHP extensions. It offers a collection of well documented and easy-to-use classes that can be used and extended to build native extensions for PHP.
TWIG
Twig is a fast, secure and flexible templates engine for PHP users.
RAINLOOP
RainLoop is a free and open source PHP webmail application for anyone wanting to use a single interface for many accounts. The application has a modern user interface and supports both SMTP + IMAP.
PATTERN LAB
Pattern Lab is more a framework for front-end frameworks, a PHP-powered static site generator or your project’s pattern library and frontend style guide.
COMPOSER
This dependency manager for PHP lets you create a composer file in your project root, run a single command, and all your dependencies are downloaded ready to use.
DIRECTUS
Directus is a free and open-source, client-friendly database GUI written in Backbone.js that provides a feature-rich environment for rapid development and management of custom database solutions.
PHP DEBUG BAR
The DebugBar integrates easily in any projects and can display profiling data from any part of your application. It comes built-in with data collectors for standard PHP features and popular projects.
PHALCON PHP
Phalcon PHP is a web framework delivered as a C extension providing high performance and lower resource consumption.
PINBOARD
Pinboard is a MySQL storage engine that acts as a realtime monitoring/statistics server for PHP using MySQL as a read-only interface.
CASEBOX
Casebox is an open source and PHP/MySQL-powered web application for storing and managing records, tasks and files. It has a desktop-like interface where we can create an unlimited-level of directories and store stuff in the structure preferred.
MUNEE
Munee is an all-in-one library that handles many things related to optimization and manipulation of website assets. The library has a powerful caching feature that can cache resources in both server and client-side.
IMAGEWORKSHOP
ImageWorkshop is an open source class using the GD library that helps you to manage images with PHP. This class is thought like photo editing software like Photoshop and GIMP: you can superpose many layers or even layer groups, each layer having a background image.
SYLIUS
Sylius is an open source and free e-commerce solution for PHP (and based on Symfony2). It is capable of managing stores of any size and having complex products and categories.
PICO
Pico is an open source CMS application that is capable of very few things, which is the main point. It uses flat-files as the database and built with PHP. Simply, there is no setup and the app works instantly.
PHP DOCUMENTOR
PHP Documentor reads the structure of your code, the filesystem structure, the classes, functions and everything in between, and generates documentation from that.
CAKEPHP
CakePHP is an open source web application framework. It follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) approach and is written in PHP, modeled after the concepts of Ruby on Rails, and distributed under the MIT License.
CODEIGNITER
CodeIgniter is a powerful open-source PHP framework with a very small footprint.
MONSTA FTP
Monsta FTP is PHP cloudware and which places FTP file management on the web browser. The user can easily drag and drop files into the web browser.
XAMPP
XAMPP is a free and open source cross-platform web server solution stack package, consisting mainly of the Apache HTTP Server, MySQL database, and interpreters for scripts written in the PHP and Perl programming languages.
NETBEANS
NetBeans is open source, and allows you to quickly and easily develop desktop, mobile and web applications with Java, HTML5, PHP, C/C++ and more.
Conclusion
PHP is an open-source server-side scripting language designed for web development but also used as a general-purpose programming language. PHP was originally created in 1994 and has gone through many changes since it’s release. Today we have many frameworks, tools and IDE’s that can speed up our development and help us overcome glitches. This article showcases the best PHP tools in 2017 that has been trending in hackathon and hackday events.