A guide to our ongoing series on launching your own business and product with PHP. Here's what to expect in coming episodes. Check back regularly for updates.

Learn how to turn your entrepreneurial business concept into an actual startup by following the instructor's own product development process.

Scope out your application features and design a database schema to support it. Use Yii scaffolding to build out most of your CRUD code.

Before you can schedule meetings with the Meeting Planner application, we need to build support for adding nearby places with the simplicity of geolocation...

To expand the reach of our startup to a global audience, we need to provide translations for a variety of languages. In this tutorial, we leverage Yii's I18n...

Code sprints are fun, but often you have to circle back to polish and integrate feature work. I'll show how frameworks provide infrastructure and support for...

As Meeting Planner grows in sophistication, we need to provide features that personalize and customize our application for users.

After laying the groundwork in previous tutorials, we're finally ready to begin building the end user functionality for scheduling a meeting, and it's...

Learn how we use Bootstrap switches, Yii 2 MVC and AJAX to gather participant availability and meeting preferences and finalize the schedule.

Mailgun's routing and API make it easy to build applications that efficiently and reliably process, parse and react to inbound messages. Learn how to use its...

Follow along as Meeting Planner gets ready to deliver its first meeting invitation and contemplate the impacts of our progress.

Now that we can deliver our first meeting invitations, it's time to ensure that the links in those emails can be authenticated and handled properly. And...

Now that we can deliver our first meeting invitations, it's time to ensure that the links in those emails can be authenticated and handled properly. And...

To make it easier for new users, we'll allow them to sign up with their Google, Facebook and Twitter accounts and let existing users connect these services...

Now that meeting organizers are ready to finalize meeting plans, we need to build and attach .ics files so attendees can import them into their calendar of...

As coding for Meeting Planner progresses, it's time to move to a production server for alpha launch. Learn how we assess hosting options and configure the...

Everyone says to listen to your users, but how? Let's look at using popular services to launch a sophisticated support system and knowledge base on a startup...

The "one man startup" is a myth—not for its growing scarcity but because startups rely on a variety of free, open-source software built by many men and women...

As Meeting Planner evolved, I needed to improve the aesthetic of our emails for the fast approaching alpha release. Follow my search for resources and...

Meeting Planner's new templates looked great everywhere... but not in Gmail. Follow me and Alice as we go into the dark wonderland of automated CSS inlining.

Meeting Planner's new templates looked great everywhere... but not in Gmail. Follow me and Alice as we go into the dark wonderland of automated CSS inlining.

After meeting participants have made suggestions and changes, we create a text summary and deliver an update to other participants. Learn how to implement this.

With meetings planned, we need to allow people to set up reminders and manage their delivery. Come learn how we architected them for Meeting Planner.

To improve the upcoming beta experience, I wanted to transform all of the scheduling commands to work interactively without a page refresh. Learn how I did...

Now that the infrastructure for people to customize their meeting reminders is in place, we need to deliver them just in time using our new HTML email...

The prospect of the alpha launch and talking to investors highlights the need for administrative management and activity reporting respectively. Let's build...

While I'm not ready to invest in multi-platform mobile apps for Meeting Planner, I wanted to enhance people's mobile experience with more responsive web design.

The challenges of managing ongoing and upcoming aspects of a startup require good tools. Learn how I used Asana to track features and bugs for Meeting Planner.

We'll look at security over several episodes, but today we'll focus primarily on locking down a web server. Join us and learn the basics of cloud-based VPS...

In this Ajax followup, I'll show you how I learned to reinitialize troublesome Bootstrap widgets and leverage the Google Chrome Browser Developer tools for...

Now that Meeting Planner can schedule group meetings, I decided to add a secure shareable URL to simplify broadcasting invitations.

With the alpha live, it was time to deepen security for the beta milestone. Follow along as I research and code additional protections in the Yii Framework.

Learn how to integrate common SMS services into the Meeting Planner application. Today we demonstrate basic signup, integration, and trial text messages.

As people plan meetings, it's important not just to allow time-zone customization but to make it proactive and simple. Follow our PHP and JavaScript...

There are lots of critical scheduling features to build and then fit into a small responsive user interface. Learn how I lean on Bootstrap to integrate them...

Often we need to change a meeting after it's been scheduled. Solving this requires both social engineering and lots of code. Follow along to see how I built it.

Supporting group scheduling has always been a major goal in Meeting Planner. I've planned for it since nearly the beginning. Follow along as I begin to add...

Supporting group scheduling has always been a major goal in Meeting Planner. I've planned for it since nearly the beginning. Follow along as I begin to add...

To make scheduling easier, I wanted people to be able to select from their Google contacts. Learn how I used the Google APIs to import them.

Finding production errors can be difficult without proper error handling or a cloud-based logging service. I tried two. Follow along and learn how logging...

To create a more friendly, social branding option, I launched Simple Planner on the Meeting Planner codebase. Learn how to do this in the Yii Framework.

In order to begin mobile app development, I needed to design and code the API for Meeting Planner. Learn how it's done and how I did it in PHP with Yii.

Learn how to make your home page more professionally aesthetic and effective by exploiting Bootstrap more thoroughly.

As I found time to polish Meeting Planner more deeply, I relied on CSS and JavaScript to add more interactive features such as easily scheduling with...

Meeting Planner users can now offer a custom URL to share with colleagues to facilitate scheduling meetings with them. Learn how to customize Yii routing to...

Learn how to leverage the Internet to raise money for your own startup with crowdfunded investments from your own customers and engaged online investors.

Building and customizing REST APIs is simple, but securing the usage of your secret application keys and verifying the authenticity of requests requires...

Adding activity balloting to the meeting planning feature required extensive changes to the application. Learn how to think about successfully adding major...

In-depth automated testing requires solid data generation. Come learn about Faker, a PHP library for straightforward data filling.

New users can benefit from a visual tour of your web application. Learn how to build one with a JavaScript library called Shepherd.

Learn to use Yii2's automated documentation generator, apidoc, as I build the API documentation for my startup Meeting Planner application.