As the editor for SitePoint's PHP channel, I communicate daily with many PHP developers. Almost every developer comes from a different backgroundeducational, racial, geographicalso the channel is truly a melting pot of cultures and approaches. Some are formally trained computer scientists, others are self-taught freelancers. Some are well-versed in enterprise etiquette, rigor, and culture; others just can't wait to just churn out code and see it work. In all of my time working for SitePoint, I've never once met two developers who have the same approach to writing and coding.

Trying to create a channel that works cohesively with such an array or writers was actually quite challenging. The writing part was easy to standardizeI enforced the Markdown format (no need to concern yourself with this if you don't know what it is) rather than HTML or Word files, passed on some links to valuable tools such as spell-checkers and text smell detectors (tools that capitalize your title, check for repeated phrases, isolate misused phrases, and so on). But when you're responsible for editing and checking hundreds of posts, it's not the writing that's the biggest problemit's the code. Writers would send their code in zip archives alongside their articles, as if thrown into a cardboard box, duct-taped, and shipped.

The code was everything from simply messy to incompatible with my version of PHP, and thus it was insanely difficult to verifyafter all, letting a malfunctioning demo go live alongside a tutorial would be unforgivable! Imagine receiving code samples from 100 different people, each configured for a separate combination of PHP + server + PHP extensions and other factors. There's simply no way to manually configure your computer fast enough to be able to go through them all reliably in a given time frame. Code needs standardization, and in big teams, such as ours in SitePoint's PHP channel, this is of utmost importance.

To remove this barrier, I used all the approaches I talk about in this book. To make them work for you and to have code that is automatically compatible with all other developers and their computers instantly would be minutes of work; however, this book was written to help you understand what is going on in these configurations, and how exactly this compatibility was achieved. Why would you want to know this, you might wonder?

Two reasons: