Tim Bowler

Finally after nearly one year I have managed to publish my first book. And I am proud to say, its all about the PHP Symfony Framework.

The Symfony framework allows you to build modern web applications and web services easily and rapidly. The MVC components separate the logic from the user interface and therefore make developing, changing, and testing your applications much faster. Using Symfony you can minimize repetitive coding tasks, optimize performance, and easily integrate with other libraries and frameworks.

Ubuntu 8.04 does not have sendmail installed by default. This was annoying when some of the php web apps that I created rely on sendmail to send out email notifications. But before going ahead and installing sendmail, I thought that I would try exim4. Installing on Ubuntu is very straight forward:

apt-get install exim4  exim4-config

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I was refactoring a few developers code today, and one thing I see time and time again is two queries in favour of a left join, . The problem is symfony makes result set retrieval so easy (thanks to propel of course).

Example:
To see if an author has a comment
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A slight performance increase for Apache is to turn off the per-directory configuration files (.htaccess), and insert them into the virtual hosts configuration file. For each Symfony project that I set up the vhost file looks something like:

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The majority of the sites which I work on incorporate some pagination. Therefore I thought it was time to create a partial for the templates. This is the very first version. I have included a link to the file at the bottom. I’m in the process of setting up a public SVN repro so please bare with me.

Symfony Pagination Partial

Two years ago I wrote my own php MVC framework. It comprised of Smarty and ADOdb, and to be honest it got the job done. It was easy for both the non-technical and technical developers to get to grips with and decreased development time. But why did I re-invent the wheel? Well back then I tried and tested a number of frameworks, and because we were running PHP4 it seemed easier to create my own.

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I couldn’t figure out why the same same project that was checked out of svn on my latop and on my desktop failed to build on my desktop. The solution was simple, yet lead me to believe it was due to the the package=”lib.model” attribute missing in the schema.xml file.

However, i found out that deleting the schema.yml file fixes the problem.

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