phpBB and Symfony: Combining Communities

Earlier this year at the Symfony Live event in Paris, I spoke with Nils Adermann, the new lead developer of the phpBB software. At the conference it was announced that phpBB was considering moving to a Symfony basis for their upcoming version 4. Since then, an RFC was posted and given the schedule for the Libertyvasion conference organized by phpBB, they're gearing up to dive deep into Symfony. This article reflects the thoughts I've offered at the Libertyvasion Conference on the combining of powers of phpBB and Symfony.

Contributing to Open Source

Last week I wrote about how me being active in Open Source helped boost my career in several ways. Now this is all very interesting, but how to go about actually contributing to Open Source. That is the topic of this blog post. How to look for the right project to contribute to, and what ways are there of contributing? Let's have a look.

Open Source Your Career, my story

About a month ago my good friend Lorna Mitchell put out a call for stories on how working with Open Source has influenced people's careers. Given that a lot of my recent career has been driven by my involvement in Open Source, I shared my story with Lorna. But I also wanted to share some of my story with everyone. So here is my story and opinion on how Open Source can influence your career in a positive way.

Ingewikkeld

Time for a new adventure. Last monday, my wife Marjolein and I visited the local Chamber of Commerce to register our new company: Ingewikkeld. We're both doing completely different things, but we've decided to capture both into a single company because it saves us a shitload of administrative work, and since we're married anyway, it doesn't really matter. I (could you have expected something else?) will be offering (PHP) development, consultancy and training services, and my wife will be a baby wearing consultant.

My privates are not public, they are protected

This week there was an interesting discussion on twitter between several people from the PHP community on the use of access modifiers, and why things should be public, protected or private, or why not. The thing that triggered this was the fact that the new Symfony2 Coding Style disallows the usage of private methods. This discussion earlier on triggered Lukas Smith to post his opinion. I commented there but the comment became thus long that I decided to write a blogpost about it myself.

Symfony Day Cologne and a symfony workshop

Just like last year I will again be present this year at the Symfony Day Cologne, which is organized by my friends at Interlutions. Last year was a huge success with many attendees, a wonderful list of speakers, and a great party afterwards. This year will be at least just as good, and is slightly extended: I will be doing a full-day symfony workshop not just on the Symfony Day but also on the day after.

A look back at the DPC Uncon

As happened the past years I was at the Dutch PHP Conference this year. Something was different though, this year. I've hardly seen a conference talk this year at DPC. This was because I was part of the PHPBenelux team responsible for running the DPC Uncon, which was held for the first time parallel to the main conference. And what an awesome uncon it was!

The DPC Uncon

Only a couple of more days until the Dutch PHP Conference takes place again in Amsterdam. I am already really looking forward to it and I know many others feel the same way. With this year's line up of speakers and topics, the conference again proves to be the best conference for people looking for advanced topics. But this year's edition of DPC has another addition: A fourth track, with no schedule so far: The DPC Uncon.

Concluding the European WinPHP Challenge

So today is the last day of the European WinPHP Challenge. Unfortunately I didn't have as much time as I had hoped to spend on my entry, MediTerra. Still, I believe I have a nice working version of MediTerra, at least as far as blobs and to a lesser extent tables go.

Blobs are nearing completion

With the deadline looming (tomorrow is the last day we can work on our projects) I've spent some time today to really get some stuff done. I hope to do some more stuff tomorrow, but at least right now I've got most of the blob stuff in there.

Connecting to Azure

After having set up my environment and started my first coding, yesterday I actually got to play around with Azure. And really, it isn't all that hard! Things like "cloud computing" and "Azure Storage" sound complicated, but I found out that, using the right tools, working with that is a breeze.

Getting some output

So time for some work on my European WinPHP Challenge entry tonight. Previously, I worked on setting up my Windows environment, and now it's time to work on getting my basic PHP setup running and configure the webserver to actually serve my PHP stuff.

Your error page can be better

Error pages. Most people don't really consider error pages when building a website or application. They usually contain some debug information so that when something goes wrong the developer knows what is wrong. But in a lot of cases when an application goes into production, this information is still exposed.

Setting up my Windows environment

Since I am not working with a Windows environment on a day-to-day basis, the first task for the WinPHP Challenge for me was to actually install a Windows environment and get my development environment up and running.

Introducing MediTerra

So not too long ago I announced I had entered the European WinPHP Challenge, a contest by Microsoft to build a PHP application that runs on Windows. Now I want to tell you a bit about the application that I'm planning to build.

Speaking at Pfcongres 2010

As has become tradition, the dutch web developers usergroup Pfz is again organizing their Pfcongres. I've been a visitor for the past years with a speaking engagement two years ago. With Pfcongres having a much bigger setup and more international focus I am very proud to announce I am again speaking this year. I will be doing my "Would you like docs with that?" talk.

Entering the WinPHP Challenge

Today I filled in the registration form for the European WinPHP Challenge (there is also a Canadian version of that here). My application, of which I will post more details in a later blogpost, will be written specifically for the Windows Azure platform. It will be an interesting experience for sure.

Laying down some PHPat beats

If there has been one buzz in the past days, it's been the announcement of Facebook of the Hip Hop for PHP (or HPHP). This new tool for PHP developers (or actually for users of PHP) is aimed at gaining performance by converting PHP code to C++ code, then compiling the C++ code to a binary which includes a web server. But what will it actually mean for PHP?

Organizing your own conference

Two days have passed now since the PHPBenelux Conference 2010. On the one hand, I feel a bit stupid to have spent the majority of my free time into a conference I can not really attend any sessions in. On the other hand, I'm so grateful that I did. Let me elaborate.

2010: New things and things on repeat

So, now that I've looked back at 2009, it is time to look ahead at the coming year. I already know it will be quite an exciting year. But it's the future, so we can't predict everything that is going to happen. But there's quite a few things I already know will happen.

2009

With the new year having started, it's always fun to look back at the previous year. Something I've done before in previous years. 2009 for me was one hell of a year, both in the positives and in the negatives. It means lots of conferences, but also a forced change of job. Let's have a look at this year.

A day filled with symfony news

Great stuff is happening today! I would dare to say that to date, december 1 2009 is probably the most active and important day in the history of the symfony project! Three(!) new versions have been released, amongst which the first of the last branch of symfony 1, and a new book is available in the form of an online advent calendar and a print book.

PHPBenelux Conference 2010

After a lot of hard work, a very tough selection after a successful Call for Papers, I am very happy to announce that the PHPBenelux Conference 2010 website  is now online, and speakers will be announced over the coming days.

Telecommuting is the next black

Recently as several quite known and respected people in the PHP community are looking for new challenges, I've been following their efforts a bit (hard not to, with Twitter these days). One thing has been surprising me all along: Companies still don't get it: They still require developers to be local.

Speaking at PHPBarcelona

Barcelona. A city I've wanted to visit for ages, yet for some reason never did. And now I get the opportunity, this week I will be speaking at this year's edition of the PHPBarcelona conference.

If it ain't broken, don't fix it

Recently, I was involved in trying to solve a blocking issue at work. It took us quite some time to figure out was what going on, and it ended up being one of those cases of "If it ain't broken, don't fix it". So, even though everybody knows about this line, I want to give it some extra attention.

PHPNW09: Nearly Perfect

As I'm writing this (though it is published later), I'm sitting in the sunday morning program of the PHPNW09 conference in Manchester. The conference started on friday night with speakers dinner and a social, with the main conference on saturday, dinner and drinks afterwards, and now the slightly less official sunday morning program. It has been a great conference.

phpBenelux september meeting

Last tuesday was the phpBenelux meeting for this month, which took place in Tilburg at the office of Freshheads. Given I was helping with the organization *and* speaking, I was a bit stressed upfront. Things worked out well though, and we had a great meeting. This post contains a short report of the meeting as well as my slides for the "Integrating symfony and Zend Framework" talk I did.

Interviewed by DevExp.eu

Not too long ago I got contacted by Kenneth of DevExp. He wanted to publish an interview with me on their website. It was quite fun answering the questions and the interview has now been published.

Formatting valid xs:dateTime fields with PHP

Recently I had to compose some XML documents that needed to be validated with XSDs. All fine of course, but I had some problem with two date/time fields that according to the XSD were supposed to be xs:dateTime fields. Googling around I found a lot of references to the ISO8601 format, so I decided to format my date using the DATE_ISO8601 constant. That did not work though.

Speaking at PHP NorthWest 09

Last year I was a speaker at the PHPNW08 conference in Manchester. It was a great conference and I've met some wonderful people there. We even held a short symfony update meeting there in one of the rooms during a break. I am happy to announce I will be a speaker again this year at the PHPNW09 conference!

SymfonyDay Cologne 2009

In the past week I have been very excited about symfony Day Cologne, and now that it's over, I was right to be excited. What a wonderful event it was! It was very nice to meet all the people, and I had a great time doing my workshop.

Holiday is over!

After a nice summer, last week was the kick-off for the new season for the phpBenelux user group. Two events were planned, one in The Netherlands and one in Belgium, and I attended both. Let's have a look at what we got...

Two new meetings in one week!

PhpBenelux, the PHP usergroup for Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg is on a roll! At the end of the month there's two cool meetings you can attend! So if you're in the area (mid-west of Germany is also "in the area" ;) ) then you should definitely come by!

Two new jobs in one week!

On monday, I started my new job at Unet. And now, I am ready to announce another new job. I have been approached by Kris Wallsmith, the previous community manager of symfony, to see if I would take over that position, and I am excited to say that I have said yes to this job!

New job!

I am quite excited to announce that I have found a new job. Starting two weeks from now, I will be working at Unet, a dutch company for broadband, fiber and VOIP services mostly aimed at the business market. My job will combine senior developer work with being the team lead of the PHP development team at Unet.

Speaking at symfony Day 2009

On september 4th Germany will see a new conference: symfony Day Cologne. I am happy to announce that I will be hosting a full-day workshop at this new symfony conference.

PHP Hidden Gem: similar_text()

Every once in a while you need to solve this unique problem. This problem that you usually only have to solve once or twice. So you start developing, but quickly wonder what the best solution is. You can write your own solution, but it pays off to at least search through PHP.net a bit to see if there is not already a solution for it in PHP.

Don't make them compete, make them work together!

Over the past weeks while I was trying to find a new job, I've made an interesting observation. Well, I made the observation before already, but my interviews over the past weeks have confirmed it: Most developers seem to limit themselves to a single framework. Be it Zend Framework (more popular than I even thought), be it symfony, there's even still a huge amount of custom "we built it because we have our own needs" frameworks out there, even in companies doing things similar to any other web development company out there.

Book Review: The Productive Programmer

While at the PHP UK Conference, O'Reilly had a stand. A new series of books caught my attention because they were not the standard "animal on white cover" book I had come to expect from O'Reilly. After looking at those books, I made my pick and went for Neal Ford's The Productive Programmer. A wise choice, as it soon turned out.

Dutch PHP Conference 2009: The Best Content Around

While Paris had Symfony Live and Nieuwegein had Joomla!Days, Amsterdam had the Dutch PHP Conference last weekend. Three days completely packed with the most amazing content from speakers that flew in from around the world. Let's have a look back at this amazing event.

Dutch PHP Conference; so what to choose?

The biggest PHP event of the year is coming for The Netherlands: Dutch PHP Conference will start with a tutorial day on thursday and the first official conference day on friday! In this post I want to give some recommendations on which sessions to visit. If you don't have a ticket yet, better get one fast! Some tutorials are already sold out, and there's only a few tickets left for the main conference days!

Also Of Community

Last week there was some fuzz about something bad happening the community. Now I'm not going to really go into that, but it is in my humble opinion hard (if not impossible) to prevent the occassional problem in a community as varried as the PHP community. But there's also much beauty in our community.

The PHP standards initiative

Much has been said already in the past days and weeks about the PHP standards initiative that was started by a group of PHP developers at the php|tek conference two weeks ago. As I was there but have not really given my opinion on this in public, I will do that now.

PHP|tek 2009: Among the classics

Last week I attended the php|tek conference in Chicago. It was one hell of a great conference, definitely one of the best conferences I've ever been to. I got to meet many people I'd only spoken to online, got to attend some great sessions and got to do some nice presentations.

Speaking at Microsoft DevDays

I had not yet posted this here, but I just wanted to let you know that this friday, I will be speaking at the Microsoft DevDays in The Hague. DevDays is an annual conference revolving around Microsoft- and related technologies, and this year it contains a 4-talk PHP track on friday.

PHP|Tek: Speaking, visiting and unconference

As I've posted before, next week I'll be in Chicago for the PHP|tek conference. I am very much looking forward to it. The schedule looks awesome, and it will be my first time on US soil.

Why should I attend PHP TestFest?

As I wrote earlier, several TestFest events will be held soon with the biggest one being the European TestFest initiative of quite a big bunch of European usergroups. But why should you attend such a TestFest?

Refactor your techportal

Just a small heads up that an article by me has been published on the Ibuildings Techportal. It's called "Refactoring your application" and dives into what is refactoring and how to do it.

TestFest is back!

Last year's TestFest was a huge success. The worldwide initiatives by usergroups and individuals gave a nice addition to the code coverage for PHP itself. This year, the TestFest period has been extended to 3 months, starting the beginning of this month and ending end of june. But a nice bunch of European usergroups including the Dutch usergroup are combining TestFest on may 9th!

Buy vs. Build on Techportal

Just a little notice that a blogpost was just published over at the Ibuildings Techportal. This is but the first thing you hear from me there, next week there will also be an article on refactoring published on the same site.

Cleaning "infected" file from the odmarco string

I use DreamHost for quite some sites, both my own and of friends. Recently I got informed that one of my sites was triggering a warning in anti-virus software and when I went to investigate, it turned out quite a few sites got hit by an annoying script that inserts a hidden iframe. Removing all those by hand would be an annoying job, so I decided to automate it. Given that I don't know much shell scripting but have a firm knowledge of PHP, I decided to give that a go.

More PHP in the low lands

As my previous post shows, PHP is active in the Netherlands, and our user group is acting on that. However there's more beyond our user group in this little country!

Dutch user group meetings all around

Last week we had a usergroup meeting in Amersfoort, and quite unexpectedly we announced that we'll have another one next week. This is slightly unusual, but you got to recognize opportunities as they arise.

Dutch user group meetings all around

Last week we had a usergroup meeting in Amersfoort, and quite unexpectedly we announced that we'll have another one next week. This is slightly unusual, but you got to recognize opportunities as they arise.

Ada Lovelace Day: Women in PHP

This morning, as the first Ada Lovelace Day posts started rolling into my Google Reader, I found out about the whole concept of Ada Lovelace Day. I immediately pledged to write a post, because I think it is a good idea to give "women in technology" some attention. I would wish it wasn't necessary, but we're living in a world where this is still necessary. I'm going to pick two "heroines" though, instead of one.

Serving frontend and backend from the same document root with symfony

For quite some time I've been struggling to set up the backend of a symfony application to be served from a subdomain that is being served by the same document root, to no avail. My backend subdomain would keep serving my frontend. Today, by accident, I found out which stupid mistake prevented this from working, so I thought I'd share.

My slides for PHPCon Italia

Here are the slides for my PHPCon Italia sessions. Both sets of slides are slightly altered versions of the presentations I did at PHP UK Conference and 4developers .

Open source and the times of crisis

As we all know by now, we're living in times of crisis. A recession is hitting us, and it's hitting us hard. Even here in The Netherlands, where at first it seemed we'd be avoiding the biggest hit, we're now getting reports that the recession is the biggest since WWII. The crisis seems to be hitting bigtime in many places. So how does it affect open source and PHP?

PHPCon Italia coming up!

This week is the week of PHPCon Italia. It already starts on wednesday with workshops, and has two conference days after that. I'll be speaking twice on thursday, in the morning I'll talk about the symfony framework in my myphpbusters talk, and in the afternoon I'll go into refactoring.

Improving your presentation by writing

Those of you who have already done presentations, whether internally in your company, at user group meetings or at conferences, know that it can sometimes be a tedious job to write coherent, useful and understandable slides. You have all the knowledge on the topics you speak about in your head, yet turning that into a useful presentation with a clear slide deck can be a hassle. One solution I recently found to this problem was writing.

The Power of Refactoring slides from 4developers

So this morning I gave my The Power of Refactoring talk at the 4developers conference in Krakow, Poland. This is the first time I've given this version of the presentation, which is quite different from the previous versions.

4developers, or: a quick trip to Poland

This weekend, I will be doing a quick trip to Poland. Overthere, a new conference is seeing the light called 4developers, and I will be part of the "dedicated languages" track with my refactoring talk.

PHP UK Conference 2009 (and my slides)

So, only two days have passed since PHP UK Conference 2009, so let's look at the conference (and my slides for the myphp-busters: symfony framework talk).

My schedule for PHP UK Conference 2009

Only a few more days until PHP UK Conference 2009! I am looking forward to it a lot. As I do with most conferences, I make my own schedule up front of what I want to see (no guarantee I'll end up seeing those talks of course).

A first look at Zend Server

Zend released a new web application server product earlier this week called Zend Server. Curious as I am, I'm going to have a quick look into it here.

symfonyUnderControl: lime integration with phpUnderControl

phpUnderControl is a continuous integration setup for automatically running certain tasks on a project such as testing, documentation building, code sniffing and more. It is based on CruiseControl and uses PHPUnit by default. The default symfony unit testing framework is not PHPUnit, so it was time to enable continuous integration for that.

TestFest 2009 is coming!

Last year the PHP TestFest was a huge success. Both the full international initiative and our dutch contribution. This year's TestFest has been announced and it promises to be even bigger than last year. Let's get that code coverage up into the far 90%!

What we can learn from yesterday's phpBB.com hack

Yesterday the phpBB.com server got hacked. People who, like me, were there back in the days of phpBB2 will be reminded of the security flaws found in the software back then. However, this was not the cause of this hack. It was an unpatched version of another PHP package that caused the hack, which exposed amongst other things the full user database and several server passwords.

public static vs static public

Ever since starting with PHP 5 object oriented development, all documentation I read on the topic seemed to suggest that the only way to write the method keywords is "public static". I've been following along those lines, and for a while I really thought any other order would trigger errors. Only recently I found out the other way round is actually nicer.

phpGG Frontend Special: We Made The Point

Yesterday the Dutch PHP Usergroup organized an event called the "Frontend Special". This event focussed specifically on frontend technologies such as Silverlight, Flex and Javascript. The event kicked ass, if I may say so.

Speaking at PHP Conference UK

In about a month time, I will be speaking at the PHP Conference UK (formerly PHP London). I will do a brand new talk there on symfony.

I want to see all of you at DPC!

This year's edition of the Dutch PHP Conference will be taking place on June 11-13, and the Call for Papers is now open. So all of you, I know you have something interesting to say, now it's time to let the DPC know!

Speaking at PHP|Tek

 I've tweeted about this on january 1st but now it's official! I will be speaking at PHP|Architect's PHP|Tek conference in may. I will be doing two presentations: My good old refactoring talk and a joint talk with Lorna on the community.

Dutch Front End Special

Today the Dutch PHP Usergroup announced their first event of the year. Instead of a regular meeting, we're going to take a bit more effort and we're introducing the phpGG Frontend Special on january 24th!

A look back

As I did last year, I wanted to have a look at this year. This year was quite the year for me, with the birth of our second child, a lot of conferences, the reviving of the dutch PHP Usergroup and new symfony versions.

Jobeet - My work is done

As I've written earlier I've been helping out with the symfony Jobeet tutorial. The tutorial runs for another two days, but my work is done. Well, sort of. So time to look back at Jobeet...

On symfony 1.2, Jobeet, frameworks and Spore

I've been really busy lately hence it being quiet here. My TODO list has quite a few topics I want to write about, I just need to find the time. So what have I been up to? Mainly Jobeet, work and Spore ;)

The Power of Refactoring slides from PHPNW

This weekend the PHPNW conference took place in Manchester. It was a great conference and my talk went much better than at IPC in Mainz in my opinion. There's always room for improvement but this was definitely better. Here's my slides...

BugHuntDay Zend Framework was great!

Yesterday was the first BugHuntDay that our dutch PHP usergroup organized together with the Belgian usergroup. Somewhere between 25 and 30 people (I forgot to do an actual headcount) came together in Roosendaal to work on fixing bugs in Zend Framework.

The Power of Refactoring slides

Here's my slides for today's presentation at the International PHP Conference on refactoring.

My schedule for IPC'08

Next week is the International PHP Conference 2008. Aside from me speaking, I will be attending most of the conference. Here is what I think I will be going to.

Symfony Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration. It is something that a lot of companies don't actively work on. It is very useful though. I am currently working on bringing CI to symfony in the form of phpUnderControl. This message is a short status update for those who already knew I was working on this.

The first BugHuntDay is coming!

In May of this year, the Dutch PHP Usergroup (phpGG) re-launched after a while of inactivity with a very successful PHP TestFest. After this succesful collaboration with our friends from phpBelgium and having done our first dutch meeting, we're again going to collaborate with phpBelgium to help the community at large: The BugHuntDay is coming!

Distributing your project with symfony embedded

With symfony 1.0, one of the nice features was the freeze option, which allowed you to package the symfony libraries inside your project quite easily. This was very useful, for instance when deploying your project on a server where you couldn't install symfony. With symfony 1.1, it is apparently not advised anymore to use the freeze option (even though it is still available). So how should this be done then? Let's have a look...

A good day

So today was a good day. The only thing bad was the fact that FC Utrecht lost in the dutch cup and is thereby thrown out. By Ajax, nonetheless. However, that is quickly forgotten when I think of all the good things.

Speaking at PHPNW 2008

I am quite excited to announce that one of my proposals for the PHPNW conference this year has been accepted. On saturday november 22 I will be in Manchester, speaking about refactoring.

Re-launching the dutch PHP usergroup activity

Earlier this year we re-launched the dutch PHP Usergroup by participating in the PHP TestFest together with our Belgian colleagues. Now we're getting back into regular activities as well!

Debugging with symfony

At SymfonyCamp last weekend I did a session on Debugging with Symfony. The slides for that presentation are available on slideshare , or here...

Center of Expertise

Yesterday my employer Ibuildings made an announcement that I think will be very good news for the PHP community as a whole. A new initiative, the PHP Center of Expertise. Once again, an initiative that confirms I made the right choice last year.

Speaking at the International PHP Conference

I've only just announced my session at this year's SymfonyCamp, and already I can announce the next one. I will be speaking at this year's installment of the International PHP Conference, one of the biggest conferences in the PHP realms of this world.

Speaking at SymfonyCamp 2008

After having organized the event last year, I am very happy to announce that I will be speaking at this years edition of the SymfonyCamp in Leusden, The Netherlands. SymfonyCamp is one of the best ways of getting in touch with the symfony community - and you'll learn something in the process.

DbFinderPlugin: The ORM isn't important anymore

Today I tried the DbFinderPlugin for the first time. I am truely impressed. Using this plugin, it is not necessary anymore to really care about which ORM you pick for your project. It's the thought behind symfony 1.1 taken into the symfony ORM-selection.

Adding a link to a form element with Zend Framework

At work, I am at the moment working on a Zend Framework project. Opposite to earlier projects with Zend Framework, I am slowly learning of the power behind the framework. But not all of the power is document well enough. On friday, I encountered one such small detail.

Symfony-framework.nl - The Community Edition

Last week, I put online the new version of my dutch symfony advocacy website: symfony-framework.nl. The main focus is not advocacy anymore though, I feel that even though that still needs to be done, it's not anymore the main thing needed in The Netherlands.

Code analogy

In a Skype conversation with me and a few colleagues today, my colleague Ivo Jansch explained to us the difference between meta() and postMeta() in the atkMetaNode. He used for this the analogy of pregnancy. The analogy was too good to leave for the few that attended the skype chat, so I am publishing it here - with permission of Ivo - for everyone's education. ;)

Details make the difference

While playing around with the Zemanta API today, I bumped into a small problem. I first attempted to do it in symfony using the sfWebBrowserPlugin, but as I kept running into a 403 Developer Inactive error, I decided to try other tools, to see if the problem was on my side or on Zemanta's side. The problem, as it turned out, was on my side.

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.

More namespace gotchas

Earlier on I had a problem with namespaces for getting XML attributes. When I finally got that sorted, I ran into an even weirder problem when fetching elements using xpath. Again, it was just a tiny little detail.

My name is in print again

No, I still have not written a book (though there are actually plans for that ;) ) but my name can again be seen in print. After my first official print mention as technical reviewer of Packt's phpBB book, I am now happy to announce I am named and even quoted in Michael Kimsal's new PHP Job Hunter's Handbook.

A small SimpleXML gotcha (with namespaces)

I've so far worked only very little with XML with namespaces, especially in terms of parsing it. Therefor, I was quite stumped today on the parsing of a particular snippet of XML which contained an element that had an xlink:href attribute. I just couldn't get that attribute's value out. The solution, as often seems to be the case, is quite simple.

Ibuildings partners with PHP|Architect

I was already quite proud when I got the possibility to work at Ibuildings. They've shown to be (one of) the most professional PHP companies in the Netherlands, and after they partnered with Zend, it all became even more interesting. Now, I am even more proud to work for Ibuildings; they just announced a partnership with PHP|Architect.

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...

Dutch PHP TestFest

The Dutch PHP UserGroup is organizing PHP TestFest in The Netherlands. I am quite excited about this, as we will be directly supporting the PHP project and ensure the stability of PHP as a language.

Two great evenings

Yesterday and today I have been away from home (I am actually quite happy that my presentation for tomorrow evening was cancelled, I actually get to stay home). Both evenings I really enjoyed myself, both evenings in the presence of some people I know mainly online.

Recent symfony presentations

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

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.

Zend Studio for Eclipse

Since a few weeks the new generation of the Zend IDE for PHP is available. Instead of the completely Zend-written IDE that there used to be, this one is based on the Eclipse platform, a platform I've never really been a fan of...

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 certificate is in!

My Zend Certificate just arrived!

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.

Now it's up to PHP5

Finally the day has come. The final PHP4 release is available , so from now on, aside from possible security issues, no new PHP4 releases will be done. PHP5 is without a doubt the main line for PHP now.

WikkaWiki

For a while, I've been looking at several implementations of Wiki software. MediaWiki is nice, but very heavy on the server. Not weird, considering the software is loaded with features. Of course, a lot of those features are hardly needed, so I chose to stay away from MediaWiki. After trying various other Wiki implementations, I came by WikkaWiki. It has all the usual features of a wiki, but isn't too loaded with features that I don't need. I just need some wiki functionality. Looking at the code, it was quite easy to customize. And fully XHTML and CSS-based, which is also a big plus. And so I now have a fully functional wiki for my Electronic Music World website. I also immediately made a slight change to the code.

Php5_zce_logo

not tested in IE


Upcoming events

I will be speaking 08-10-2010: Symfony Day Cologne 2010
I will be speaking 09-10-2010: Symfony workshop

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