Symfony Blog: A simple CMS for symfony
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The symfony blog has posted a look at a common problem developers face when working up content-heavy sites - which is the way to go, a CMS or an application in a framework?   Like us, you probably met this case several times: A client has to choose a tool for his website, which is a mix of content managed in the backend, and specific features in the frontend. The choice is between an open-source CMS and an open-source framework.   There's talk of advantages and disadvantages for both and, finally, a common solution that combines the two - a CMS created in symfony. Fortunately, some developers saw ahead enough to create one in the form of a symfony plugin - sfSimpleCMSPlugin (screenshot).
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Though it contains no code, this new article on PHPBuilder provides a good perspective for those looking to get into PHP and what to expect to find.   A couple of months ago, I knew almost nothing about PHP, only that is was a programming language that I needed to learn. Today, my whole site relies upon PHP and I have gained the confidence that almost anything is possible using PHP. I accomplished this achievement using methods that I will describe in this article.   The author talks about the methods followed to get into the language, including making smaller goals at first, just to get used to things. The manual is also suggested as a "best friend" for a developer and looking at other people's code can provide insight into your problems.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHPBuilder.com: AJAX and PHP Part 2 - XML Communication/ProcessingCommunity News: Zend Framework 1.0.0 ReleasedMike Potter's Blog: Slides for today's e-seminar on Flex and PHPBlogSecurity.net: Interview with Stefan Esser on WordPressCommunity News: India's First PHP UnconferencePro::PHP Podcast: Newscast for 2007.06.28JSLabs Blog:  How to create Microsoft Office Documents with PHPPEAR Blog: Request for ideas: New developer FAQPHP-Coding-Practices.com: Composing Methods: Split Temporary VariableRob Allen's Blog: Spanish versions too!
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The International PHP Magazine is back this week with the results from their latest user poll that asked the question "Which Stage Comes First in the Development of the Basic CMS?"   Of course, of the options they gave, "Planning your CMS" came in with an overwhelming lead of 60.5 percent of the votes. Lagging far behind that was "Further Development" and "Database creation". It is good to see that a large majority of the people out there think that taking the time out to plan out the application first is the best way to go. Throwing something together, especially something that can get as complex as a CMS, is a very bad idea.   Be sure and get your votes in on this week's poll that asks which of the given options including "Web and command-line interface" and "Generates a todo list from @todo tags in source") wouldn't be a good option to be added to the phpDocumentor functionality.
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In response to a previous article from the Symfony blog, Paul Jones has pulled together some thoughts to some of the comments they made.   As the author of a relatively popular benchmarking article, I feel compelled to respond to this bit of misguided analysis from the Symfony camp about benchmarks.   Paul talks about the "straw-man arguments" presented in the Symfony article, including some references to Paul's previous benchmarks. He's even broken it down into a point-by-point response to make each point clear.
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In his latest blog post, P&aacute;draic Brady talks about a "sweeter alternative" to using Smarty for your site's templating - Template Lite.    Use the term Template Engine in a PHP forum and the word "Smarty" will inevitably crop up. I like Smarty but, similar to a few PHP libraries, it's very bloated.   I try to keep my applications lean and mean - small, fast, and adaptable. Unfortunately, Smarty disagrees with my needs. It's bloated design while packing a mighty punch, uses a chunk of memory and processor time I dislike. Since I also develop open source apps which end up on shared hosts, my concerns are even more justified.   Enter Mark Dickenson. Mark is the developer of a Smarty alternative: Template Lite.    He talks about what Template Lite is and what kinds of advantages it has over Smarty, including staying try to its name. P&aacute;draic measures it as not only being faster but also having 50% of the memoery footprint that Smarty does. He seems to favor it for those places when he just needs something light and easy on a site.
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:PHPClasses.org: File upload progress meter for PHP 4, at last!Zend Developer Zone: Zend Framework Preview Release 0.6.0 AnnouncedIBM developerWorks: Generate Flash movies on the fly with PHPMike Bernat's Blog: Creating a Simple Registration Script using PHPphp|architect: An overview of the CakePHP frameworkPHPBuilder.com: Reading RSS feeds in PHP: Part 2The Bakery Blog: SwiftMailer Component TutorialPHP-GTK Community Site: Merry Christmas (A Holiday Widget)Ben Ramsey's Blog: Installing the Eclipse PHP IDEZend Developer Zone: Zend Studio 5.5 WalkthroughCommunity News: Vancouver PHP Conference 2007Edin Kadribasic's Blog: BenchmarksJSLabs Blog:  phpBB 3...is it worth the wait?Christopher Jones' Blog: Installing Oracle XE on Ubuntu with PHPChris Chabot's Blog: phpSocketDaemon
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As announced in this new post to the Symfony blog today, "The Definitive Guide to Symfony" book from APress has officially been published. Along with that release comes another - the 1.0 RC1 release of the framework itself.   We are very proud to announce the official release of The Definitive Guide to Symfony, a book that myself and Fabien spent the last months writing. The 490 pages of this book explain all you need to know from starting up symfony to managing a symfony application, with a lot of practical examples and expert tips. It is available in bookstores right now.   The book is released under the GFDL license (it's a free download) and can be purchased at most book retailers.
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Dave Dash has posted a configuration that he had shared with him for getting nginx and the symfony framework to work happily together.   I almost gave up on nginx and was going to settle on lighttpd or Apache, but I decided to check the symfony list and in minutes Kiril Angov (Kupokomapa) answered with a working nginx configuration. This is why I like the symfony community.   He includes the config in an easy to use/c&p kind of format so you can drop it into your install and get it up and running quick.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHP-Coding-Practices.com: How I Turned A Slow Array Sort Into A Quick One Using Quicksort AlgorithmZend Developer Zone: PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 4: Planning ProgrammingWeb Development Blog: Save bandwidth with PHProxy and ip2nationJob Posting: Assembleron Ltd Seeks PHP 5/MySQL/Ajax Developers (Reading, UK)PÃ¡draic Brady's Blog: Complex Views with the Zend Framework - Part 6: Setting The TerminologyThe Bakery: Four New Articles - Load Balancing, Request Info, UUID Behavior & Upload ThumbnailsCommunity News: PEAR Installer version 1.6.0 releasedChristopher Kunz's Blog: Building PHP with cURL and libmysqlclient5DevShed: Working with Prepared Queries with PDO Objects in PHP 5Secunia.com: rPath update for gd, php, php-mysql, and php-pgsql
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Paul Jones has run some benchmarking on four different frameworks - CakePHP, Solar, Symfony, and the Zend Framework - to check for overall speed and has come up with some interesting results.   Anger-inducing broad-brush overview: Solar is 4x faster than Zend, and almost 2x faster than Symfony. Read on for all the nuances and caveats.   Throughout the rest of the post he talks about the methods that he took for testing the frameworks and that his goal was the fastest response time only, nothing about the actual functionality. The test was as simple of a "hello world" that he could get in each one.   He's provided the benchmarking results, as provided by Apache's ab testing script for the base (just PHP manually) and then for each of the frameworks, providing the code used as well. There's also a helpful bit on which classes get loaded for each of the frameworks to see what the overhead is. Symfony tops off this list with 43 total libraries for what ends up as a simple echo statement.
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The Symfony project has made a major announcement today - with the latest release of the project, they've made it to the 1.0 mark! Symfony version 1.0 has been released!    At last, the long-awaited 1.0 stable version of symfony is just released. For all those who waited for the "stable" status to dive into symfony, the time has come.   The 1.0 is not just another release. We call it an "enterprise" release, which means that we will keep on maintaining it for a long time (that is, for several years). When a new release of PHP comes with its wagon of BC break, we will update symfony 1.0 to make it compatible. When a bug is found and corrected in one of the components of symfony 1.0, we will update the stable release to make the symfony experience always better.    Congrats go out to the >entire team and all of the many, many contributors to the project. Hitting a stable release is no easy mark and it's great to see one of the best PHP frameworks out there hit it dead on.   Oh, and help spread the word - add your digg!
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Lukas Smith is sending a wakeup call to the internet providers and web hosters out there - get involved in the PHP community!   We do not seem to have any ISP's active inside the PHP community. This is kind of odd, considering that PHP seems to be driving the business of hosters quite a bit. Why have none of them decided that PHP is important enough for their business that its worthwhile to ensure that their interests are taken into account?   He makes the suggestion of passing along the suggestion to bosses/co-workers/anyone who'll listen about getting involved. Suggested places to start would be as a part of the testers group or even contributing to the migration guide.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:IBM developerWorks: PHP frameworks, Part 1: Getting started with three popular frameworksWeb Development Blog: Tutorial: FTP Upload via cURLJoey's Blog: 8 Practical PHP Regular ExpressionsJeff Moore's Blog: Keywords and Language SimplicityAlessandro Crugnola's Blog: AMFPHP and mbstringTravis Swicegood's Blog: Why Inheritance SucksStefan Mischook's Blog: Creating Custom PHP Functions Video Tutorial - Part 3Johannes SchlÃ¼ter's Blog: PHP 5.3 UpdateInternet Super Hero Blog: mysqlnd to support PDO, mysqlnd in PHP 5.3Jacob Santos' Blog: Object Oriented Programming Isn't Easy
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David Wheeler presents an introduction to the Bricolage content management system (CMS).
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Scott Mattocks is back with the latest installment of the PHP-GTK news, issue number 22.   It's been a while, but I finally have some time to get back to summing up the world of PHP-GTK. Things have slowed down a little in the past few months on the development side but that doesn't mean that the world of PHP-GTK 2 has stood still.   In this edition, there's a call for help for anyone that would want to join the other (4!) developers in working on the PHP-GTK 2 project as well as some general information about the project and its involvement in the community - from talks at php/db|works, International PHP Conference, and the Zend/PHP Conference to the many PHP-GTK-related articles being printed to a new online resource for PHP-GTK tutorials.
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The International PHP Magazine has posted results from their latest PHP community poll as voted on by visitors to their site. The question for this poll asked developers what they thought, of the choices on the list, was the most common mistake that PHP developers make.   Coming in at number one by an overwhelming lead was "Not escaping entities and SQL input" (a definite problem indeed) with the next highest option, "Not using a Framework" a full twenty percent lower. The next two options were closer (descending) - "Using old PHP versions" and "No or little use of Object Orientation".   There's a new poll this week for your consideration - this time asking which stage, of the five options, should come first in the development cycle of a typical content management system. Head on over and cast your vote today!