Dmitry Yakovlev dimayakovlev

Creating URL slugs properly in PHP (including transliteration for UTF-8)

The point to use a slug (semantic URL) besides of improve the SEO of your articles is to prevent that the user, at the creation of for example an article, it uses special characters that aren't allowed in a URL, appropiate the usage etc. What target usage means, is context dependent.

In this article, you'll learn how to slugify a string in PHP properly, including (or not) support (conversion) for cyrilic and special latin characters.

Slugify in PHP

The following function exposes a simple way to convert text into a valid slug:

58 bytes of CSS to look great nearly everywhere

When making this website, i wanted a simple, reasonable way to make it look good on most displays. Not counting any minimization techniques, the following 58 bytes worked well for me:

main {
  max-width: 38rem;
  padding: 2rem;
  margin: auto;
}

Git Commit Best Practices

Basic Rules

Commit Related Changes

A commit should be a wrapper for related changes. For example, fixing two different bugs should produce two separate commits. Small commits make it easier for other developers to understand the changes and roll them back if something went wrong. With tools like the staging area and the ability to stage only parts of a file, Git makes it easy to create very granular commits.

Commit Often

Committing often keeps your commits small and, again, helps you commit only related changes. Moreover, it allows you to share your code more frequently with others. That way it‘s easier for everyone to integrate changes regularly and avoid having merge conflicts. Having large commits and sharing them infrequently, in contrast, makes it hard to solve conflicts.

GetSimple Theme Developer Language Helper Functions

Allows GetSimple theme designers to have theme-dependent language strings in a lang folder of their theme.

Usage

Add language_functions.php (from this gist) to your current theme's folder.
Create a lang folder in your current theme
Create language files for your theme with file names corresponding to language codes:

	#!/bin/bash
	# This script was originally used for create virtual hosts on CentOs.
	# Created by alexnogard from http://alexnogard.com
	# Improved by mattmezza from http://you.canmakethat.com
	# Adapted for Apache2 on Ubuntu by Stephen Downes at https://www.downes.ca
	# Feel free to modify it
	# PARAMETERS
	#
	# $usr - User
	# $dir - directory of web files

	$timeout = New-TimeSpan -Seconds 30
	$timer = [Diagnostics.Stopwatch]::new() # Create a timer
	$timerAndStart = [Diagnostics.Stopwatch]::StartNew() # Create a timer and start it
	$timer.Start() # Start the timer
	$timer.Stop() # Stop the timer
	$timer.Elapsed # Get time elapsed
	$timer.IsRunning # Is timer running?
	$timer.Restart() # restarts the time, doesn't stop
	$timer.Reset() # stops timer and sets to 0
	$timer.Equals($timeout) # check if timer value equals a value such as timeout, returns boolean

	/*
	This method works similarly
	to jQuery's `closest` method.

	```
	$('.foo').closest('.bar')
	```

	Except, instead of returning an
	element, it executes a function.

	/*
	https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/07/improving-user-flow-through-page-transitions/

	You can copy paste this code in your console on smashingmagazine.com
	in order to have cross-fade transition when change page.
	*/

	var cache = {};
	function loadPage(url) {
	if (cache[url]) {

	'use strict';
	var gulp = require('gulp');
	var gutil = require('gulp-util');
	var del = require('del');
	var debug = require('gulp-debug');
	var $ = require('gulp-load-plugins')();

	gulp.task('clean:pages', function() {
	gutil.log('Deleting /pages/*/', gutil.colors.magenta('123'));
	return del([

	<#
	Display a randomly selected holiday quote in a festive color scheme
	you can find more Christmas quotes at
	http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_christmas.html

	Learn more about PowerShell:
	http://jdhitsolutions.com/blog/essential-powershell-resources/

	#>