SymfonyLab

So as we’ve promised here goes more slides for online viewing:

1. Symfony 2 by Fabien Potencier

It’s long one but contains great information “where will be moving symfony in next 1-2 years”.
Frankly, I’m a bit confused b/c I feel that symfony 2 wont be compatible with 1.x branch. I did not hear that but I dont think after all these major changes compatibility is still possible.

2. Sympal – The flexible Symfony CMS by Jonathan H. Wage

We’ve already heard about sympal (i read about it in twitter from goyello’s guy) and had a quick look into that but I never thought I’d be interested to use one more self-written CMS. I must say I was wrong. After I’ve seen these slides I understood a few things. First of all Sympal contains whole bunch of new plugins sfSympalXXX which can be used separately in own projects. Also it’s really more like Drupal than like Wordpress or Joomla
Sympal is good source for anyone who is planning to use YUI in his symfony projects. Also it’s simply good source for anyone who want to improve his symfony skills (I wont recommend it for beginners).

What I dont like is “slots” (it’s not sympal problem/idea though). Not sure maybe I just did not see good slots realization but I really preffer Joomla’s way of publishing/ordering modules.

3. What’s New In Doctrine by Jonathan H. Wage

What is really clear from these slides – everything is much simpler and better in Doctrine 2.
So I understood – it’s time to start using doctrine instead of propel
Sorry Propel I loved you sooo much. You were great and I’ll be missing you but you were really slow sometimes and needed to much server memory

Did we miss any interesting slides from conference? Yes we did.. there were lot of them in French and unfortunately we dont speak French (we wish we can). Hopefully someone provides us English versions so we can review them as well. Would be really great.

Have a great weekend symfonians!

Definitely interesting to read through conference slides (downside is only 3-4 presentation are in English and the other are French):

First Day Slides

Second Day Slides

The most impressive to us is Yahoo sliders. It’s food for thinking. Here is just a few things we’ve discovered after presentation reading:

R3 (Easy Localization and Translation)

ysfAPIClientPlugin

ysfBuildPlugin

ysfYUIPlugin

(what is interesting though if I’m looking for YUI plugins in plugins are of symfony site – there is no any of these plugins there which is at least strange).

Gonna keep reading and I guess it’s worth to put here some of conference slides so anyone may read them online without downloading huge PDF files.

Here is the Yahoo ones and other interesting presentations are coming:

Interesting part of it is ySymfony project. Unfortunately, there is not much on web regarding it except a few mentioned already plugins (which are part of ysymfony) and presentations.

My opinion is: if “Yahoo! powered by open-source technologies” why dont them publish it ySymfony as open-source and bring this power back as well?

While reading this article

http://www.compdigitec.com/labs/2009/01/24/set-of-patches-to-allow-php-gtk2-to-compile-with-php6/

was surprised that php6 is so close. I must say I’m not a fan of php upgrades. I mean for me php always had enough functions / syntax and I would not ever change them (since php4) except fixing bugs. Of course this is wrong thinking b/c moving forward is probably the most important thing to give a chance for language to survive. But knowing about php6 it makes me think that the biggest issue I can think of symfony is another one symfony release (which would support php6) which wont be compatible with previous versions. I mean that we have symfony 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 and all of them are actually incompatible. So as a result we have to support (and keep in mind differences) for all 3 branches. Plus it’s not really straightforward to keep 3 working branches of symfony on the same server.

So I really wish that symfony would either support some kind of good migration tool (so the project WORK after migration operations) or keep next releases 100% compatible with 1.2 without any “but” things.

Just a thought if there is a way to use symfony and GTK together?

Am looking through this book quickly:

Pro PHP GTK

and looks pretty good.

There is thread in forum regarding GTK:

http://forum.symfony-project.org/index.php/m/37926/?srch=gtk#msg_37926

which generally says that there is no way to use GTK and symfony but probably can be written “view” plugin which allows to use that?

On the other hand looking on their site PHP GTK and no changes since 16-May-2008, so does that mean GTK is dead?

Dreaming of Visual Symfony are still around me

Hi all,

I’m wondering if anyone ever needed to use .php extension for symfony pages. e.g. you may want to make your urls look like http://domain.com/home.php or http://domain.com/mypage.php. If so here is the solution:

First of all dont forget to enabled suffix option in your apps/frontend/config/settings.yml:

.settings:
suffix: .php

Then important to add the line which would take care of .php files in .htaccess file:

# we skip all files with .something
# comment the following 3 lines to allow periods in routes
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \..+$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.php$
RewriteRule .* – [L]

In your routing.yml you use the same code as normally:

mypage:
url: /mypage
param: { module: index, action: mypage }

And that’s it
We hope it was helpfull, wish you great day!

Are you still using both symfony 1.0.x and symfony 1.2.x
We’ve figured out another one solution which you can use to keep both branches on same Windows machine.

So you can keep symfony 1.0.x branch configured on Windows and you can run portable Ubuntu:

Portable Ubuntu Runs Ubuntu Inside Windows

and install symfony 1.2.x on it.
Ubuntu approach has really huge advantage though: you can keep your symfony configured and ready on USB drive and you can use it wherever you need (e.g. you can take it into pocket for demonstration).

We are happy to announce the upcoming publishing of SymfonyLab lessons.

In some sense this would work similar to Askeet and Jobeet projects. We are planning to publish step-by-step articles which would describe how to create some kind of project. At the moment we consider the lessons for creating bidding / auction project (bideet). But it’s not the final decision so if anyone has better idea – let us know and we may change our mind.

The other difference compared to Jobeet/Askeet – we are planning to use some video files which would help beginners so they can see everything in work!

We are planning to start symfony lessons publishing from next week so don’t miss it

Wish you the very great weekend!

Hey, I’m inspired by this article today:

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/how-to-add-variables-to-your-css-files/

Of course approach used in this article is a bit overcomplicated and it wont work in symfony without changes.

So I was thinking how would I add custom PHP code into my symfony app’s CSS. First quick solution which came on my mind was to rename .css to .php and use custom PHP code where I need. Now when layout will include css it will fill it in with proper variable values (and even cache that code by symfony caching mechanism?).

But, in fact I’m wondering why this piece of code does not process php:

$this->addStylesheet(’customcss’);

I believe it would process it automatically at some point

I like though the other approach which seems to me more flexible for usage:

RewriteRule ^(.*\.css)$ index.php?module=home&action=process_css&filename=$0

So we can have an action which would process requested CSS and customize it on the fly. Frankly, I did not try this but potentially I believe this approach has more advatanges than other ones.

How about you? Have you ever needed to customize your CSS on the fly?

Hi,

It’s more like question than post though.
So we considere the possible options to distribute the project easily. Never had about any kind of installer for symfony project or any kind of installation process.

Moreover as it turned out freezing is not the case starting 1.1.x branch as it mentioned here:

http://www.leftontheweb.com/message/Distributing_your_project_with_symfony_embedded

The good is that there is provided a workaround in that article.
The goal actually is to allow visitors to download zip from site and easily install it on their server like it works for the other well known software like WP or Joomla.

Unfortunately there is noting helpfull on symfony forum:

http://forum.symfony-project.org/index.php/m/34092/
http://forum.symfony-project.org/index.php/m/17689/

however these posts raisen the other interesting thing – how to lock descributing application (crypt or use license number or so).

Interesting anyone had such experience? Please leave us a comment brothers and sisters

I guess finally I became jQuery fan. It did not happen quickly though. As symfony from the beginning uses Prototype I was staying for the long time prototype-oriented

But I believe in last time improvements and extra plugins developed for jQuery went through critical edge and now it’s beyond comparison (this is for discussion though, every frog likes own bog).

But either you are jQuery fan or not I’d like to share what I’ve read today.

First is Google AJAX Libraries API, strange but it went accress me and I’ve not heard about it before this day:

http://code.google.com/intl/uk-UA/apis/ajaxlibs/

The AJAX Libraries API is a content distribution network and loading architecture for the most popular, open source JavaScript libraries. By using the Google AJAX API Loader’s google.load() method, your application has high speed, globaly available access to a growing list of the most popular, open source JavaScript libraries..

Of course it contains both jQuery and Prototype and the other well-known libraries. I’ve also read that this is not accessible in some countries like Iran which will cause your site not working but except that I believe this is good idea.

Another interesting link I’d like to share is:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/08/70-new-useful-ajax-and-javascript-techniques/

I went through demos and must say it looks amazing.. E.g. ical-like-calendars, Moving Boxes, interactive map… I believe anyone can find there anything usefull for himself.

Hope you will like it too