By Jordan Hall 14th February 2018
Country information is used so frequently in modern web development. This is especially true in customer relationship managements systems and e-commerce websites. Since we do a lot of e-commerce and CRM development here at Rapid Web Services, we developed an open source library to easily retrieve country information. The rest of this post will detail how you can use this library, PHP Countries, and what it is capable of. Installation To inst...
By Jordan Hall 3rd November 2017
If you've ever needed to display opening times for a business on their website you'll probably have encountered the edge case of differing opening times on UK Bank Holidays. The UK government provides information regarding all UK Bank Holidays, and we've written a small open-source PHP library to take advantage of this. Installation You can install the PHP UK Bank Holidays package using Composer. If you've never used Composer before, you can fi...
By Jordan Hall 17th August 2017
This article is aimed at developers looking to migrate existing data from one database schema to another. It should be very useful if you are planning to move from one system to another, such as moving from Drupal to WordPress, or wishing to migrate external data into a new bespoke system. The UXDM (Universal Extensible Data Migrator) is an open source PHP library we have created to simplify the process of moving data from any source to any dest...
By Jordan Hall 25th April 2017
At the beginning of last year, I posted about our open source contributions from 2015. Most of these projects focused on frontend web development. This time around, the majority of our new open sourced projects are backend code and libraries. They also include a small selection of 'Simple' libraries, designed to wrap around complex functionality and abstract it. Here's a summary of our main open source projects and contributions from 2016 &...
By Jordan Hall 7th March 2017
To help developers easily implement the basics of Stripe into their website and quickly accept payments, we created the open source PHP library SimpleStripe. SimpleStripe SimpleStripe is a package that allows you to really quickly setup a payment form on a website and charge customers. As you probably guessed by its creative name, it makes use of the Stripe payments system. Although Stripe itself is already a very developer friendly ...
By Jordan Hall 7th January 2016
In 2015, Rapid Web Services made a commitment to increase their contributions to the open source community. We therefore started several open source projects. This post will go over some of the most interesting open source contributions we made last year. Direct Share Buttons Including large amounts of external JavaScript and 3rd party code for all the various social media sites can be a pain. They can slow down the loading and rendering of you...
By Jordan Hall 19th October 2015
Google Contacts PHP library We're happy to announce that we have recently open sourced a Google Contacts API PHP client library. This library is MIT licensed (so anyone can use it) and available on our GitHub account. For more information about Rapid Web Services Services open source efforts, please visit our Rapid Web Services open source mini-site. About This Google Contacts API library is designed for use in PHP frameworks and general PHP...
By Jordan Hall 19th June 2015
In recent years, open source software has become more frequently used by businesses and individuals alike. Why is this, and what makes open source solutions so increasingly popular? Below I list five reasons why open source software can be good for your business. Security The security of software used in your business is very important. It is used to protect, process and store your company's intellectual property. By its nature open source softwa...
By Jordan Hall 9th February 2015
I recently gave a presentation at Rapid Web Services regarding Git. It covers the background of Git, how it works internally, and some examples of daily use. The presentation also covers commonly used Git terminology and provides a frequently used command reference. 'The Fundamentals of Git' presentation is embedded below. Comments and constructive feedback are definitely welcome. This presentation is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribut...
By Jordan Hall 17th December 2014
Security warnings in modern web browsers are weird. When you browse to your favourite online shopping checkout or your online bank account, you get a happy lock icon. That's great. It reminds users they are on a secure webpage, that...
By Jordan Hall 17th October 2014
With all Turing complete programming languages, there are many different ways of performing the same task. Be it sorting, searching, looping through a list, outputting content to the screen or to a file - they can all be accomplished by a variety of differnet methods. PHP is no different, therefore it is worth looking at the different ways in which tasks can be performed, and benchmarking their performance. This allows us, as developers, to id...
By Jordan Hall 3rd September 2014
As a business you want a fast, secure and user friendly payment system for your e-commerce website. Stripe provides such a solution. A good payment system will ensure your potential customers do not get confused or annoyed and proceed to finish their purchase without issue, converting leads directly into a sale. Stripe also does not require a dedicated merchant account and should work with any accepted bank account. It also benefits from lower ...