DragonBe's PHP blog

I am a regular listener to the Security Weekly Podcasts Network, that includes Hack Naked News, Business Security Weekly, Enterprise Security Weekly, Secure Digital Life and Application Security Weekly. I really love their shows and over the years I've been listening to them, I learned a lot about business leadership, communication and security. If you're in tech, I can highly recommend listening to their podcasts. And since I'm always on the go, these are great shows to listen to while driving around.

But… and here it comes: for some reason they have a love-hate relationship with PHP, where their disliking of the technology is omnipresent in their shows. Particularly in their Application Security Weekly they love to pick on PHP and blame it for all the evil that exists on the internet. On one hand, I cannot blame them since the strength of PHP lies in the fact that anyone can write a dynamic website within a few minutes. The downside is also that anyone can write a dynam…

I'm participating (as much as possible) in the #30daysoftesting challenge organised by Ministry of Testing and SauceLabs. If you're interested, read the full 30 Days of E-Commerce Testing article and join this fun and educational challenge.

The 2nd challenge on the list was to read and share interesting blog articles about E-commerce testing. Since I'm working as a PHP professional I thought it would be great if I oriented my focus on testing PHP based E-commerce platforms. I picked WooCommerce as it's an easy to install and use E-commerce solution. For Magento, PrestaShop and others I've added useful links at the bottom of this article.

WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an add-on for WordPress, allowing you to integrate E-commerce functionality directly within your blog. This ensures you can be up-and-running in no-time. Even though WooCommerce and WordPress are very active community-driven projects, they both suffer from legacy that has been carried along with WordPress…

DEPLOY DOCKER CONTAINERS FAST TO MICROSOFT AZURE It’s hard to ignore the fact thatDockeris a way to move forward for rapid application development, distributed architectures and microservices. For developersDockeroffers great advantages as they can build their containers specifically for the task they work on. They grab a base image of a container, modify it for their purpose and prepare the functionality inside the container. Quality, testing and security teams now have a single instance to look at and ensure all functional and regulatory requirements are met. System engineers now don’t have to worry about providing a system with the required specs as the container is already provisioned for that purpose. But where do you deploy yourDockercontainers? You can set up your existing bare metal infrastructure to allow them to run containers, but this also means you need to learn about securing your container infrastructure, which is not an easy task. Luckily “the cloud” offers container …

When I started my European Commission (EC) VAT Information Exchange System (VIES) project back in 2011, PHP 5.3 was the current version that has given us so much. Earlier that year version 5.2 was announced End-of-Life and everyone was excited about the new features in PHP coming with the 5.3.x releases.

But fast-forwarding to today, PHP 7.1 is the latest stable release and PHP 5.6 only gets security fixes until the end of this year. In the mean time several open-source projects like PHPUnit, XDebug, Zend Framework, Laravel, Joomla, TYPO3, Magento and Symfony announced they stop development for PHP 5 versions and now only move forward with PHP 7.1 and higher.

After seeing Sebastian Bergmann’s talk PHP 7: Reality Check I was empowered by his reasoning that it’s not worth putting support in outdated PHP versions and focus on the current and future versions that will make a difference in functionality, performance and security.

For this reason I would like to announce that the European …