Tutorials

27 articles in this category

September 15, 2026

How to persist and load PHP entities into and from a single XML file with DOM-ORM

DOM-ORM is a lightweight, zero-setup PHP persistence layer that stores attribute-mapped entities in a single plaintext XML file. It requires no database server, SQL client, or binary files, making data easy to open, grep, diff in Git, and is human-readable. DOM-ORM requires PHP 8.3+ (up to 8.5) and is MIT-licensed. It is tailored for small datasets, and the documentation covers all features in detail. Here, I'll focus on a practical walkthrough.

February 18, 2026

Fixed: slow full-text searches in VS Code on macOS

I recently experienced really slow full text searches in VS Code. These are the steps that fixed that behavior for me. Since I switched Macbooks recently, I suspected that I had missed some OS defaults. First, I verified that this is not related to any of my numerous Extensions in use by starting VS Code […]

Filed under Tutorials
& Web Development

August 18, 2025

Porting a DDEV MySQL/MariaDB database to PostgreSQL with pgloader

A Step-by-Step guide on how to migrate a DDEV projects' MySQL/MariaDB database to Postgres 17 and re-configure DDEV.

November 1, 2024

Overriding PHP files from Vendor Packages

Let's say you have a PHP Project that is based on Composer. You have found a bug in a vendor package and you need to fix it. What do you do? In this article I want to list a couple of options you have and outline differences, as well as look at each options Pros and Cons.

Filed under PHP,
Tutorials
& Web Development

August 16, 2023

Installing Eclipse PDT and Java JRE onto a RAM disk under macOS

Other IDEs come and go. Yes I'm looking at you Atom. But Eclipse PDT is still around. It's not the most popular one, nor does it fully support PHP 8, yet. Nonetheless, it's still a great, highly customisable IDE. A bit bloated, a bit slow at times but a worthy alternative to VS Code, PhpStorm, Nova, Sublime Text and whatnot.... This article shows you how to install and setup this IDE with Java onto a RamDisk on macOS for maximum performance.

Filed under Tutorials
& Web Development

December 15, 2022

Build & Watch SASS files and other frontend assets with PHP

I use NodeJS, its package manager NPM, and even NVM to install different versions of NPM in many projects to build frontend assets. My recurring use case is: compile some SASS files into CSS, join some files, minify the output, copy fonts and icon fonts, pre-compress static assets, and so on. I am familiar with helper tools like Grunt and Gulp to set up these tasks. In a recent PHP project, I tried to avoid the use of NodeJS/NPM. I was surprised how easy it is to achieve the same results with nothing but plain old PHP.

Filed under PHP
& Tutorials

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