[ratings]
This time we’ve decided to review open-source Open Eats Project “an open source recipe/meal planner that can be accessed by anyone across the Internet much like other commercial sites”:
This is not only web-site though but also symfony 1.0.x driven project available for downloading.
Does not look like project is actively evolving, last posts in blog is dated by this summer (there was mentioned that 2nd version is planning which would work with symfony 1.2). But even though it’s pretty much ready for using. So basically it’s great source for self-learning. The project is sharing as bundled with whole symfony framework and there is detailed instruction about installation. Of course installation itself is not user-friendly (and comments at the bottom just proves that. It’s not symfony problem but pretty major problem of developing some kind of 3rd party tool which would simplify running of symfony driven projects for end-users. We already wrote about this problem some time ago).
But at this project we see in first time some kind of “install” tool for symfony project – it’s located in /web/setup folder – non-symfony script which asks for db/app settings and write them into symfony conf files.
Another interesting thing in Open Eats Project – it uses Zend Lucene for search feature.
Code is pretty well formatted and accurately written so anyone interested can easily understand in which modules what to look for.
A few plugins are using there which we never used, e.g. sfEventCalendarPlugin, sfPagerNavigationPlugin so was interesting to look on them (for symfony 1.0.x though).
We did not like that all database stuff is located in big config/schema.xml file. As for us, it’s preferably to keep db logic in separate plugins which would give this project extra value as those plugins could be re-used in another projects (e.g. user management related stuff), etc.
Another note it’s not actually community (main page of site states “Website community to shares recipes”). It’s rather “multiuser recipes management tool” 🙂
But even though if you are symfony 1.0.x beginner (is there still any who start learning symfony with 1.0.x ? :-)) – it’s worth to look into this.