Building Your Startup With PHP

Learn how to turn your entrepreneurial business concept into an actual startup by following the instructor's own product development process. If you want to get up to speed on the fundamentals of PHP, you may also like our in-depth PHP tutorial, almost seven hours of free video instruction to take you from PHP beginner to programming pro.

Posts in this series

Building Your Startup With PHP: Table of Contents
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.
Jeff Reifman
2 Jan 2015
Code
Building Your Startup With PHP: Getting Started
Learn how to turn your entrepreneurial business concept into an actual startup by following the instructor's own product development process.
Jeff Reifman
2 Jan 2015
Code
Building Your Startup With PHP: Feature Requirements and Database Design
Scope out your application features and design a database schema to support it. Use Yii scaffolding to build out most of your CRUD code.
Jeff Reifman
16 Jan 2015
Code
Building Your Startup With PHP: Geolocation and Google Places
Before you can schedule meetings with the Meeting Planner application, we need to build support for adding nearby places with the simplicity of geolocation...
Jeff Reifman
10 Feb 2015
Code
Building Your Startup With PHP: Localization With I18n
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...
Jeff Reifman
9 Mar 2015
Code
Building Your Startup: Access Control, Active Record Relations and Slugs
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...
Jeff Reifman
4 Apr 2015
Code
Building Your Startup With PHP: User Settings, Profile Images and Contact Details
As Meeting Planner grows in sophistication, we need to provide features that personalize and customize our application for users.
Jeff Reifman
13 Apr 2015
Code
Building Your Startup With PHP: Scheduling a Meeting
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...
Jeff Reifman
20 Apr 2015
Code
Building Your Startup With PHP: Scheduling Availability and Choices
Learn how we use Bootstrap switches, Yii 2 MVC and AJAX to gather participant availability and meeting preferences and finalize the schedule.
Jeff Reifman
18 May 2015
Code
Using the Mailgun Store(): A Temporary Mailbox for Your App's Incoming Email
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...
Jeff Reifman
6 Jun 2016
Code
Building Your Startup: Delivering the Meeting Invitation
Follow along as Meeting Planner gets ready to deliver its first meeting invitation and contemplate the impacts of our progress.
Jeff Reifman
5 Sep 2016
Code
Building Your Startup With PHP: Email Commands
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...
Jeff Reifman
12 Sep 2016
Code
Building Your Startup With PHP: Email Commands
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...
Jeff Reifman
12 Sep 2016
Code
Building Your Startup With PHP: Simplifying Onramp With OAuth
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...
Jeff Reifman
19 Sep 2016
Code
Building Your Startup: Exporting iCal Files into Calendar Events
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...
Jeff Reifman
27 Sep 2016
Code
Building Your Startup: The Open-Source Foundation Behind Meeting Planner
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...
Jeff Reifman
17 Oct 2016
Code
Building Your Startup: Refining Email Templates
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...
Jeff Reifman
19 Oct 2016
Code
Building Your Startup: Responsive Email for Gmail
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.
Jeff Reifman
21 Oct 2016
Code
Building Your Startup: Responsive Email for Gmail
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.
Jeff Reifman
21 Oct 2016
Code
Building Your Startup: Delivering Notifications
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.
Jeff Reifman
4 Nov 2016
Code
Building Your Startup: Preparing for Reminders
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.
Jeff Reifman
10 Nov 2016
Code
Building Your Startup: Dynamic Ajax Forms for Scheduling
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...
Jeff Reifman
15 Nov 2016
Code
Building Your Startup: Sending Reminders
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...
Jeff Reifman
21 Nov 2016
Code
Building Your Startup: The Dashboard Foundation
The prospect of the alpha launch and talking to investors highlights the need for administrative management and activity reporting respectively. Let's build...
Jeff Reifman
23 Nov 2016
Code
Building Your Startup: Improving the Mobile Web
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.
Jeff Reifman
28 Nov 2016
Code
Building Your Startup: Issue Tracking and Feature Planning
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.
Jeff Reifman
2 Dec 2016
Code
Building Your Startup: Security Basics
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...
Jeff Reifman
20 Dec 2016
Code
Building Your Startup: Ajax for Meeting Times and Places
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...
Jeff Reifman
29 Dec 2016
Code
Building Your Startup: Invite People via URL
Now that Meeting Planner can schedule group meetings, I decided to add a secure shareable URL to simplify broadcasting invitations.
Jeff Reifman
30 Dec 2016
Code
Building Your Startup: Increasing Security
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.
Jeff Reifman
10 Jan 2017
Code
Building Your Startup: Preparing for Text Messaging
Learn how to integrate common SMS services into the Meeting Planner application. Today we demonstrate basic signup, integration, and trial text messages.
Jeff Reifman
17 Jan 2017
Code
Building Your Startup: Automatic Time-Zone Detection
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...
Jeff Reifman
24 Jan 2017
Code
Building Your Startup: Advanced Scheduling Commands
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...
Jeff Reifman
30 Jan 2017
Code
Building Your Startup: Requesting Scheduling Changes
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.
Jeff Reifman
7 Feb 2017
Code
Building Your Startup: Meetings With Multiple Participants
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...
Jeff Reifman
14 Feb 2017
Code
Building Your Startup: Completing Group Scheduling
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...
Jeff Reifman
21 Feb 2017
Code
Building Your Startup: Importing With the Google Contacts API
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.
Jeff Reifman
22 Feb 2017
Code
Building Your Startup: Error Logging
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...
Jeff Reifman
1 Mar 2017
Code
Building Your Startup: Running Multiple Domains
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.
Jeff Reifman
14 Mar 2017
Code
Building Your Startup: Designing a RESTful API
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.
Jeff Reifman
15 Mar 2017
Code
Building Your Startup With PHP: Bootstrap Your Home Page
Learn how to make your home page more professionally aesthetic and effective by exploiting Bootstrap more thoroughly.
Jeff Reifman
17 Apr 2017
Code
Building Your Startup: Leveraging Bootstrap, Ajax, and jQuery
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...
Jeff Reifman
24 Apr 2017
Code
Building Your Startup: Leveraging Crowdfunding
Learn how to leverage the Internet to raise money for your own startup with crowdfunded investments from your own customers and engaged online investors.
Jeff Reifman
8 May 2017
Code
Building Your Startup: Securing an API
Building and customizing REST APIs is simple, but securing the usage of your secret application keys and verifying the authenticity of requests requires...
Jeff Reifman
22 May 2017
Code
Building Your Startup: Approaching Major Feature Enhancements
Adding activity balloting to the meeting planning feature required extensive changes to the application. Learn how to think about successfully adding major...
Jeff Reifman
29 May 2017
Code
Using Faker to Generate Filler Data for Automated Testing
In-depth automated testing requires solid data generation. Come learn about Faker, a PHP library for straightforward data filling.
Jeff Reifman
28 Jul 2023
Code
How to Build a User Tour With Shepherd in JavaScript
New users can benefit from a visual tour of your web application. Learn how to build one with a JavaScript library called Shepherd.
Jeff Reifman
30 May 2023
Code
Programming With Yii: Generating Documentation
Learn to use Yii2's automated documentation generator, apidoc, as I build the API documentation for my startup Meeting Planner application.
Jeff Reifman
26 May 2017
Code