2018 Madison PHP Monthly Meetings
1 Jan - 31 Dec 2018 at Madison College

Users frequently want to be able to create webpages in a way that gives maximum control over the appearance and layout of the page while requiring minimum technical knowledge. Software libraries exist to make content editing simple (CKEditor, Mercury), and content layout simple (Gridstack, w2ui), but there seems to be no drop-in solution for handling editing and layout in a single package. This talk describes an approach that combines Gridstack and CKEditor on the front end with a PHP application on the back end, to create an intuitive but powerful site editing solution designed for non-technical users. Solutions to problems combining the two libraries are discussed, along with trade-offs between layout flexibility and the responsiveness of the resulting sites.

Being a consultant sounds amazing - set your own hours, choose your own projects, work where ever you want! Is this fairy tale dream true? Well, sort of. While consulting does have its perks, there is a lot of work that goes on behind that scenes to make it a success. Learn what goes in to running a successful consulting business and how to decide what to charge.

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HTTPS is the future of the internet, providing security, getting that cozy "Secure" lock on your browser and enabling a speedy future with HTTP/2. Forcing HTTPS helps secure our content and gives our users confidence to use our products. In 2016 WordPress even added HTTPS support to the minimum requirements for web hosts. But what if your site is already on HTTP? What if it contains hundreds of blog posts full of content and plugins importing content from outside sources? There's a lot to consider including all the absolute URLs to images in your database, outside links to your site, your google analytics account, setting up page redirects and testing to make users aren't seeing mixed content warnings. This session will cover lessons learned from forcing HTTPS on four separate WordPress websites.

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Developers are unit testing, QA staff is integration testing, Users are acceptance testing. Do you really need to add browser automated tests too? Have you ever experienced side effects of upgrading third party components or server configuration changes? Do you have trouble testing your entire site to ensure bugs weren't introduced? If so, you may need browser automation testing. In this talk, we see how to combine Puppetter, Mocha and Chai to automate your browser and test all your site's components. This will lead you to deliver your updates reliably and catch bugs before they get deployed.

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Are you searching unstructured data or text fields? Do you need to aggregate and summarize your geo, financial, or other numeric data? Do you want to query your structured data in new and exciting ways? If so, Elasticsearch may be right for you. Let’s explore the many ways you can ask questions of your data and have it make sense to you and your users. We’ll sort through millions of rows in milliseconds and give you the tools to take your data analysis to the next level. You will learn how to use basic RESTful API calls to store, search, and aggregate your data.