Symfony Resources Central - symfony

Towards symfony 1.1

Romain Dorgueil — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:55:00 +0200

After more than one year since symfony 1.0 was released, symfony 1.1 goes more and more mature each day. Recent RC releases are a proof of it, but many people are still concerned about whether or not they should migrate.

Documentation?

Many people are complaining about the fact it lacks documentation. In fact, it seems that many people fears that because François announced he was leaving the symfony core team, nobody would take care of documenting the project.

But that's something any big open-source project come to see one day, a former or important team member leaves the project, because he or she doesn't have anymore time for it, differ views, change interest, or whatever else.

As he said, no-one is irreplaceable, and new people comes in too, hopefully. Developpers from many countries started recently to fix and translate existing documentation for symfony 1.1, a new mailing list is being created for documentors and the symfony core team is currently putting a great effort on it too.

Documentation!

The symfony documentation page is split by version and language, and the 1.1 english version is getting attention to adapt parts of it in the need. But even without that, if you know symfony 1.0 pretty well, you should not have hard time to updating, as every changed part were because they were judged too complex, or not "clean" enough. The new way to do things is usually easier.

To demonstrate it, people from symfony core team published a little serie of articles on symfony-project.org recently:

Nicolas Perriault published an article about form internationalization, something you could not do to do so easily with symfony 1.0 helpers.
Fabien Potencier demonstrated how handy was the new sf_format feature, to provide the same logical content within different formats, or for instance, different views. He also explained how to customize a project's directory structure, showing the use of ApplicationConfiguration and ProjectConfiguration classes.
Carl Vondrick explained how to use Propel 1.3 to boost your ORM layer performances (be aware though that PHP 5.2 is needed, while symfony 1.1 only requires PHP 5.1.4).
I published two little tutorials about sending emails and using tasks.

And more are to come, of course!

And about forms?

The only part of symfony which needs a bit of learning is the new form framework, which is quite radically different from the 1.0 way to create form. And about this, Fabien recently announced he will publish an entire book about it.

To migrate or not to migrate

Symfony 1.0 is Long Term Support version, which means that symfony team will go on fixing bugs for three years since the original release. If your project is nearly released or already released, I would not bother upgrading, because you would not benefit of symfony 1.1 new features, while you'd suffer the upgrade process.

On the other hand, if your project is very young, I think the time to take the step is now, the official 1.1 release being real soon. You'd benefit of all new features with a very active community and a very reactive development team.

HashBin now available in open-source flavor

Romain Dorgueil — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:58:00 +0100

Our first violin missed his plane yesterday, so Kwatuor is still not available in the upcoming unusable buggy pre-alpha (that miss all the functionalities anyway).

But while we're waiting for him to be available, I released HashBin in open-source, so anybody can dive into the code, and help me making it evolve. It still needs many attention, but hey, time is not the most available resource I have, and that's one of the two major reasons to give it to the community. Another one is that there is not so much open source symfony applications, and even less open source doctrine applications. After the doctrine 1.0 feature-freeze announcement, this could be a step to have simple sample applications (I hear little sarcastic laughs in the background...) people could dive in to learn this amazing ORM.

Well stop talking, here is the code.

TRAC web interface: http://trac.dakrazy.net/
SVN DAV repository: http://svn.dakrazy.net/hashbin/trunk/

SVN access is read-only for anyone, if you ever want to contribute, I'll be glad to grant you a commit access either on trunk or branch (still have to make up my mind, but at beginning that's not very important). Just ask me on IRC (hartym@freenode).

What amazing feature will you invent today?

I'd like to hear a Kwatuor play nice symfonic music

Romain Dorgueil — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:58:00 +0100

Today's post is a bit special.

This can be took as a question.

Or a call to developpers that have specific blogging needs.

Since quite a moment I used dotclear for blogging. That suit my needs, in some way, but maybe I'm more adaptating my needs to dotclear's capabilities. Maybe you're using wordpress. or any other. And I guess that must be the same for you, thinking for example of integrating one of those all-in-one blogging/cms platforms cleanly in another website, for example, is being more than utopian...

By clean I mean integrating it without having to duplicate the template. Neither having to use all functionalities if you only need a simple article list somewhere... And without being limited if you need to display the headers of those on another website...

I'd better not speak of blog networks communicating, or taking content from RSS/XML/anything feed in a flexible way.

So today I'd like to announce the birth of Kwatuor. Kwatuor is a blog platform project using symfony and doctrine, that will in the near future use doctrine migrations to get content from an existing dotclear/wordpress project, or any other source platform someone has enough need with he'd take the time to write migration classes for.

Templating system will be different. I'm still hesitating between a generator approach (generated partials from a dynamic skeleton, that all can be customizable) and a real proper template system (but still any part would be customizable). Only major difference with blogging platform would be the total forbidding of DRY-breaks a dotclear-like templating system is doing everyday. And this extends to integrated blogs, in wider projects.

In fact I started developing it for my own needs, but I think this is typically the kind of project everybody would need someday. Maybe you hate being jailed in your obscure, yet very good, but specific and... even more obscure blog platform.

So I'm wondering now, if people (you :p) would be interested in this project. If so, I'll make a public SVN/trac next week, so concerned users will be able to give feedback with code in their hands. Would this be usefull to you? Would you contribute to this open-source project? Do you have good (or bad :p) ideas about concepts to take in consideration from the beginning?

Related links

Doctrine Migrations

Complex relations population in propel

Romain Dorgueil — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 23:47:00 +0100

Since quite a bit, I've been faced with an annoying problem on every projects I use propel on. Propel builders only generates some specific cases selection methods, which consists of pretty ugly copy paste of the same code to populate the objects, and if your needs are not satisfied by the finite little number of propel handled cases, you'll have to either use pure SQL, or write a custom doSelect method. That seems okay at first sight, but it is not. In fact, you're about copypasting the propel generated method, and that's a rude violation of D.R.Y. principle.

I found no solutions during the two last years, but maybe things will change soon with the new sfPropelImpersonatorPlugin. This plugin is aiming at doing arbitrary object population based on informations provided by propel's introspection methods (DatabaseMap/TableMap/ColumnMap) to link populated objects.

The plugin is currently in very early stage, but is working pretty well for my needs, and I'm looking forward to know what others are thinking about it.

Tired of spam? Try dkAntispamPlugin

Romain Dorgueil — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 23:49:00 +0100

After last week hashbin's new release, I decided to publish dkAntispamPlugin. That's an early release, and by now it is not very feature-full, but it's doing the job we ask it, and since now, proved efficient on HashBin to make not public the pretty large amount of spam I get on it.

In One week, we got 40 messages with spam_value<10 (all checked, no spam), 14 more with spam_value<20, some of those were not spam but either inconsistent, or URL-full, 97 more between 20 and 50 (100% spam) and 498 more over this, which i'll consider as spam (don't really feel like reviewing all those).

For now, the plug-in only makes some reg-exp check, length check and URL count checks, but I'm planning in adding IP check and refining reg-exps to be less CPU eating. If any of you have anymore ideas to improve it... You're all welcome :-)

At the same time, I refactored sfGeshiPlugin to dkGeshiPlugin, to leave sf prefix for official symfony plugins, so be sure to check the wiki or documentation if you're using it.

Hashbin v3 just went to public beta

Romain Dorgueil — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 06:57:00 +0100

I'm proud to annouce that HashBin v3 is out, using the latest improvements to dkGeshi (old sfGeshi, soon public) and the brand new dkAntispamPlugin, which can give a text a note about its probability of being spam, or junk. If everything goes well with hashbin, and after some required (i guess) tuning to the plugin, it will go opensource to let you take advantage of it.

For thoose who never used it, HashBin is a free PasteBin service, a collaborative debugging tool allowing developpers to share source code snippets. Hashbin is powered by the Symfony Framework and PHP Doctrine ORM.