Michael Nolan

I spent a good proportion of last weekend doing web development - what an exciting life I lead! First up on Friday night I finally managed to get a few moments to knock up a new Advent Calendar. Basically the same symfony-powered site as last year (which is also available for them’s that missed it) but with a new colour scheme and now using the commentable behavior plugin instead of my homebrew effort.

On Saturday I headed up to Waddecar to work on the new West Lancashire Scout County website. Mark Charlton, Pierre and myself did most of the work in a weekend before the summer but life caught up with us and it never got finished. So in 7 hours it was polished off, and that included accidentally running:

$ symfony propel-build-all

Learnt my lesson now

I’m pretty happy with the site for a first release. The top navigation bar is quite neat - a bit of JavaScript created using sfPJSPlugin which can be included on other sites in the West Lancs “network”. Should hopefully build a bit more cohesion between the various sub sites. Options in the back end allow it to be customised with different colour schemes and functionality. Already Network are interested in having some extra buttons to use across Local Scout Network sites.

My already-infrequent blog entries might be a bit less frequent while I’m updating the Advent Calendar but I’m going to try to post occasionally to the Web Services blog.

We’ve just advertised a web applications developer post at Edge Hill University. Alison has given a good insight into what we’re doing, where we’re going and why you might want to work here on the Web Services blog so go check that out.

I mentioned this on the Edge Hill Web Services blog last week but it’s worth mentioning again because the the GoPHP5 website has launched and the symfony project have publicly announced their support. It really is vital that hosts and projects move to PHP5 as earlier versions are frankly dire. If you’re with a crap host, upgrade now!!

With more sites dedicated to symfony including Trac moving to a new domain and symfony-forge coming on stream I’ve found searching for symfony things is a bit more tricky - Google’s returning results all over the place. So I’ve created a Google Co-op search engine for symfony.

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=010539329620469924541%3Aq5kvm3-tc5c

Only a few sites on there at the moment but I’ll add more as I use them. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

The idea of SymfonyCamp is being mooted on the symfony mailing lists at the moment.  Sounds like a good idea to me and it seems to have worked in other open source areas.  It would be good to find out if any of the Sensio guys or the rest of the symfony core team are able to fit it into their diaries as I’m sure it would be good to have them involved.

Thought I’d post quickly about the joys of GNU Screen. I’ve been using it properly for the last six months or so since starting at Edge Hill. It’s a terminal multiplexer for *nix systems allowing you to connect to multiple shell prompts at once and switch between them at will. But it’s better than that - you can disconnect and reconnect later, even from a different location. If your SSH connection dies you don’t lose anything, simply reconnect and carry on from where you left off.

I use it to connect to the server to manage symfony projects. I constantly have a screen connection with the live and development sites for each project, web logs, home directory and usually a few other locations. There’s too many shortcuts and commands to mention here but Ctrl-A followed by 1-n changes screen; Ctrl-N creates a new screen; Ctrl-A Ctrl-D detaches your connection. If you’re a heavy shell user, especially remotely from Windows with an SSH connection then I strongly recommend taking a look at Screen.

• Symfony 1.0.1 is out - should be a straight install on top of 1.0.0 job.
• Symfony Forge is in development - looks pretty cool so far and will hopefully help keep track of the rapidly growing number of plugins.
• Fabien spoke at the PHP Quebec conference and has published slides in English and French.  Nice introduction to symfony.

sjohnr gives a good argument as to why the symfony way of using PHP for templates is right and people who think otherwise are idiots

I’ve never really understood why people would want to tack Smarty templates on top of symfony which already has perfectly good MVC separation.  Maybe they’re idiots too

Another day, another plugin release. Today it’s the turn of a package for the excellent sIFR library. sfSIFRPlugin allows you to easily add sIFR to a symfony app to swap out plain ordinary fonts for something a bit richer.

My first symfony plugin! It’s pretty basic but I think I’ve finally got my head around how plugins are created so I’ll move on to packaging up some of the more exciting bits that we’ve done at Edge Hill using symfony.

I can’t really take any credit for this one either as it uses WordPress code and images that I transferred and tidied up for our bbPress install.