Stefan Koopmanschap has a new post to the Ibuildings blog today about symfony's 1.2 release.
The first day of december started well: It meant the release of the new symfony 1.2.0 version. Aside from the additions and improvements in the code, this new branch of symfony also reinstates an old tradition in symfony: It comes paired with a huge amount of documentation in many forms. Let's have a look at what symfony 1.2 has to offer.
He mentions multiple updates and changes to the framework as well as three specific improvements in the realm of documentation - the jobeet advent calendar, a symfony + doctrine book and the constant stream of tutorials coming out of the community.
NETTUTS.com has posted the third part of their series on creating a simple PHP5 framework today:
Now that we've got a basic framework (see part 1 and part 2 of this series), we can start thinking about integrating designs with our PHP framework. For now, we'll concentrate on the front-end design, including how we can make it easy to 'skin' our new framework.
This part looks mostly at the HTML and CSS for the presentation layer (the views) to make a simple two-column layout with some basic image and text content.
On the Debuggable blog Tim Koschutzki has a new post showing how to get CakePHP to play nicely with a HABTM query and pagination.
The problem is that a user inputs some search criteria into a form, the resultset exceeds 30 rows for example and the user must be able to browse through the resultset via different pages. [...] This problem itself is in fact not much of a problem. We just need to store the form conditions somewhere and then hack it together. So what we are going to do is that we raise the difficulty bar a lot more by trying to get the pagination work over a HABTM relation.
Code is included for the model and controller to get the job done.
WebReference.com continues their series looking at user administration in content management systems. This time they look at the importance of user roles and some code to add to help manage them.
Although the operations are simple, it is vital that they be handled correctly. It is generally a poor principle to allow access to the mechanisms of a system rather than providing an interface through class methods. The latter approach ideally allows the creation of a robust interface that changes relatively infrequently, while details of implementation can be modified without affecting the rest of the system.
Their code includes methods to get all roles for a user, check to see which they are permitted to use, add a "permit" role and remove it back out. The tutorial is an excerpt from the Packt book PHP5 CMS Framework Development (Martin Brampton).
Douglas Clifton has put together a series of blog posts looking at several different types of categories that PHP applications and tools can fit into:
Rather than spending the time and effort to implement paging, I took another approach. And that was to get down to specifics. This was really a taxonomy problem, and the key was to break the page up into a top-level (general) category, and then divide the rest into sub-categories.
Douglas Clifton has taken some time to look at a group of the web application frameworks out there (not just PHP - Pearl, Python and Ruby too) and offer up some opinions on them. This new post is the result.
It just wouldn't be fair after my last post to ignore the tried-and-true server-side Web application frameworks. I am certainly familiar with all of them, though I haven't necessarily used every one in a production environment.
It's light weight, fast, and stays out of your way. There are any number of class modules to choose from, and you can discard what you don't need to lighten the load even more.
The AskAboutPHP.com blog has posted a helpful new tutorial for those using CodeIgniter out there - how to extend the native Model class to bend it to your will.
I'm in the process of creating models for my CI project, and realized that certain functions within the models were getting repetitive. Using CI's ability to create my own custom libraries, I was able to create my own custom 'Model' which extends from the core 'Model' object. How this simple architecture has cleaned up my code is simply remarkable.
Rather than overwriting the main Model.php file with some of your own changes, he suggests creating a new library, a "parent model" that can be extended instead to provide some common functions that all of your application's models might need. For something a bit more complex, he also points to this library that extends the models to give it CakePHP-like functionality.
In this new post to his blog, Manfred Webber shares an example he's put together to combine the PureMVC framework with the Zend_Amf component of the Zend Framework.
Since PureMVC is my framework of choice I could not resist creating a simple demo connecting PureMVC to the new Zend_AMF.
The sample application just responds to a button click by displaying a message inside of a text container. You can download the source that includes both the Flex and PHP sides.
New on the Solar blog is this post, a new part of their series looking at the Solar framework on the command line, focusing this time on the make-vendor command.
This entry is a continuation of the Solar CLI series--a series that aims to detail Solar CLI commands, available options, parameters, and usage examples. In this entry we take a look at make-vendor, a command to generate a new project, otherwise known as a "vendor space."
Their example shows how to make a new vendor for your application and all of the directories and files that are built out with it according to the standard Solar application layout. You can read more about this layout on the skeleton system page of the Solar manual.
The symfony blog has a new post spotlighting one of the new features of their 1.2 release - updates to its Doctrine functionality.
A lot of awesome stuff has been added recently to the next major symfony release, 1.2. Fabien has worked very hard to add without a doubt the most sophisticated features of any PHP framework that exists today. Not only are they nice features but he has implemented them in a OO way so that it is easy for me to implement the same features with another ORM, Doctrine. All this is done with very little work by me. So, give a big thanks to him if you enjoy this.
Included in the post is a real-world example showing how to use the symfony command line to build out an environment and create connections to the articles, categories and authors tables.
