A personally and businesswise successful year has gone by and the new one is still starting slowly. Time to look back how the blog has been doing since I relaunched my site last February and set some new goals for 2015.
Hot topics
Some topics that sticked out in one way or the other:
Unit Testing
My all-time top article from 2011 [PHP] Mocking Built-in Functions Like time() In Unit Tests was still the second most visited in 2014 and I am happy to say that the concept that it introduced got some new attention:
- Matthew Weier O’Phinney (@mwop) used it to test output-emitting code. See: Mock header() in PHP to Unit Test Controllers
- Markus Malkusch developed a nice function mocking library inspired by my article, php-mock. Also he found and documented another edge case where it doesn’t work (currently an open PHP bug).
PHP 5.3 Death March
The most controversional, most discussed and most clicked article of 2014 was my announcement to drop PHP 5.3 support wherever possible to force adaption of current PHP versions (5.3 reached its end of life in August 2014 and does not get any security fixes anymore since then).
I feel in good company because soon after, Anthony Ferrara (@ircmaxell) kicked of the same discussion on larger scale on Twitter and elsewhere with his articles about PHP versions:
Vagrant
I wrote a series on articles on Vagrant, specifically to introduce it for Magento developers, published on integer-net.de. Until now it is only available in German but I published an English summary in the Webguys advent calendar that covers everything to get you started: Türchen 19: Kickstart your Magento Dev System with Vagrant. Two of the four teasers on this blog made it into the top ten of 2014 (see numbers below).
Continue reading “Retrospective: The Blog 2014”
