Laravel 4 Beta →

Laravel, my prefered PHP framework has hit v4 (in beta). Go check it out!

Uploading Images to Amazon S3 With Laravel

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), is a nice little service for storing images in the cloud. When building an application, I usually prefer to keep my assets on my own server, but put any uploaded images into an S3 bucket. I’m going to show you how to upload files and get them in your S3 bucket.

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Laravel 4 Sneak Peak →

I’m really excited for this. I  think Taylor is bringing something brand new and awesome to PHP frameworks, and I can’t wait to start writing apps with it.

Quick Snippet: Automatic Link Parsing with Markdown

While writing a web app with the Laravel PHP framework, I needed the ability to allow users to write posts with Markdown. I used an awesome bundle called Sparkdown by Phill Sparks, to handle the heavy lifting. Unfortunately, what it doesn’t do is automatically create hyperlinks from urls. 

All Laravel apps have a library folder, where you can drop classes in, and have them autoloaded for your convenience. I went ahead and created a very simple class with a single function that takes a string argument, which looks for urls that aren’t already Markdown-ready, and wraps the link in angle brackets. With these angle brackets, the Sparkdown bundle will turn them into proper hyperlinks. Here’s my class:

class MD {
	public static function linkify($aString){
		$url_regex = '(http|https|ftp)\:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}'. 
		'(:[a-zA-Z0-9]*)?\/?([a-zA-Z0-9\-\._\?\,\'\/\\\+&%\$#\=~])*[^\.\,\)\(\s]';
	   // Only replace if it isn't already a Markdown style link
	    return preg_replace(
	        '/' . '(^|[^\[\(<"]\s*)' . '(' . $url_regex . ')' . '/',
	        '$1[$2]($2)',
	        $aString
	    );
	}
}