Left on the Web

Dutch PHP conference 2008

Last year, back then I was not yet employed by Ibuildings, I spoke highly of the Dutch PHP Conference. It was an excellent event, with enough variation in speakers and topics. This friday and saturday, this year's installment of the same conference is taking place.

Javascript graceful degradation in symfony 1.0

Even though in this day and age of Javascript, most people do not really think about this anymore, it can still be important to have your site working when someone either has no javascript or has it turned off. It does happen, so you better think about it a bit. Symfony has some neat features for graceful degradation.

Getting Real symfony

Recently I wrote a review of Getting Real , the book by the guys from 37signals. But how, if at all, does this apply to, for instance, symfony ? Let's take some points from the book and see how symfony does...

Getting Real

When I recently did a presentation at pfCongrez , as a thank you I got the book Getting Real by the people of 37Signals. I had until then not heard of the book yet, but it's an excellent view on software development.

Recent symfony presentations

Both last saturday and this saturday I did presentations on symfony. They were mostly the same presentation, slightly different.

Twitter + Lifestream + Ma.gnolia Roots = Left on the Web 4.2.0

I just did a quite big update of the software running this site, adding some new features. Some are as easy as putting a little script on a page, others are quite a bit harder. Let's have a look at what I added.

Some symfony tips for beginners

I started using symfony by taking a single workday to walk through the first seven steps of the Askeet tutorial. After that, as time was scarce, we dived into the project we were planning to use symfony on. Here I'll present you with some tips that I either found or experienced myself.

Event Calendar

Aside from the earlier announced Dutch PHP Conference , symfony will get more attention during dutch events the coming months. Because of this, I decided to make a small event calendar on this site.

Dutch PHP Conference 2008 and symfony

Last year, while I was not yet working for Ibuildings, I did an introductory session on symfony at the Dutch PHP Conference. I was really looking forward to the event , and it turned out to be the success I expected . Ibuildings proved beyond a doubt that they organize a killer conference! This year, the DPC is back, and stronger than ever!

Using sfFileCache directly

You can configure a lot of caching in symfony, so rarely do you need to cache things yourself, but it may happen that one day you decide you need it. I came to that point when I wanted to cache certain results from external web services. I could have used the Function caching, but in this case I wanted to keep a bit more control, possibly altering the cache etc.

Deployment as it should be

In the development lifecycle of web applications, I think deployment is something that doesn't get nearly enough attention of developers. But where you can test your code, testing deployment is a bit harder. A good system for deploying applications is therefore a useful thing to have. Symfony has a very easy and strong system for deploying applications based on rsync.

Steer CMS

Steer CMS is a new open source application based on symfony. It offers a CMS for websites in a way similar to other open source CMS'es, yet is based on symfony and so quite a bit more interesting to me.

Introduction to symfony podcast

Due to yesterday's happy news I only picked up on another joyful thing happening yesterday somewhere very late in the evening. So let me announce it today: The episode I recorded for the PHP Abstract Podcast on symfony was published yesterday.

The status of symfony 1.1

Lately there seems to be an increase in the #symfony room on freenode of people asking how to go about working with symfony 1.1. Let me give a short status of the new version of the framework.

Symfony sprint

On december 20, the symfony team organizes a symfony sprint : A full day of work on just symfony. From fixing bugs to getting the documentation up to speed. And I will also be working on symfony that day, helping out with this symfony sprint.

Symfony Lounge: Second Life symfony

Second Life is gaining popularity these days, amongst geeks and non-geeks. It's taken me a while to stand and understand the use of Second Life, but especially for knowledge sharing I see the use after attending a presentation inside Second Life. And since my wife is very good at creating things in Second Life, the idea for a hangout place for symfony enthousiasts was born.

Creating a tag cloud in symfony

As you can see, I've created a tag cloud implementation here on my website. For this, I actually started writing a plugin, and I'm actually still working with that one here. But since the functionality was already implemented in another plugin as well, after a short discussion it was decided that my more limited implementation (just the tag cloud) would be moved to the snippets part of the symfony website as a helper.

Mijn Eerste Project

In a terrible spur of symfony community productivity, I just also finished the dutch translation of the My First Project tutorial for symfony.

Symfony-framework.nl launched!

I've just launched a public beta of the symfony-framework.nl website. It's a website advocating the use of symfony.

Symfony and PHP 5.2.4 may be a nono

Last week, I automatically updated my PHP installation to the latest version dotdeb was offering me (which usually poses no problems). However, this time around I ended up with two problems.

SymfonyCamp - All I can say is WOW

Last week was SymfonyCamp, a three-day event around the symfony framework. It was amazing.

Updating multiple select boxes in Symfony using AJAX

For a client, I had to present a bunch of select boxes where users could select a genre, then a sub-genre based on your genre of choice, then a second level of sub-genres based on the selected sub-genre.

SymfonyCamp - a new event for Symfony-minded people

Earlier this year we organized PHP Bootcamp, a one-day event in which we had discussions about several frameworks. It was a huge success. It was an afterthought after another idea though.
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