Michael Nolan

I’ve already blogged about the event for work but since people are more likely to find my own site I thought I’d mention it here as well.

My presentation “symfony: PHP doesn’t have to be crap… and how we used it to bring Web 2.0 to Edge Hill University” seemed to go okay from my point of view - I’ll leave the glowing reviews to members of the audience!

Met a bunch of cool people and heard about lots of interesting things that they’re doing. Etap Hotel gave me two rooms that hadn’t been cleaned - I must be unlucky as the same thing happened at IWMW.

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!!

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.

• 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.

Just launched our latest site at Edge Hill - “Hi” - to the world.  Uses symfony with plugins for both Wordpress and bbPress to integrate them into the main site.  It’s designed for applicants to Edge Hill to find out what University is really like through forums and blogs from real life students.

12 registered users and counting

François Zaninotto has just released a symfony plugin that wraps up jQuery. Allows some very cool stuff and much nicer than the jQuery plugin I started writing! Also very good to see that François now has a blog - definately one to add your your feed reader!

At long last symfony 1.0 is out.  I’m currently running the last Release Candidate but will upgrade this week.  Get it while it’s hot!