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.
posted on June 18, 2009 - 1 comment(s) - tags: php, book, review, symfony, efficiency, best practicesWhile 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.
posted on June 16, 2009 - 1 comment(s) - tags: dpc09, dpc, php, symfony, amsterdam, conferencesMuch 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.
posted on June 2, 2009 - 0 comment(s) - tags: php, symfony, cake, zend framework, solar, pear, agavi, standardsLast 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.
posted on May 27, 2009 - 2 comment(s) - tags: php, tek09, phptek, conference, symfonyLast 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!
posted on April 24, 2009 - 0 comment(s) - tags: php, testfest, symfony, zend framework, qaLast 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.
posted on April 8, 2009 - 1 comment(s) - tags: php, symfony, phpgg, linux, php, usergroup, eventFor 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.
posted on March 23, 2009 - 3 comment(s) - tags: symfony, php, howto, apache, vhost, rewrite, directoryindexHere 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 .
posted on March 19, 2009 - 1 comment(s) - tags: phpitalia, php, conference, slides, symfony, refactoringAs 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?
posted on March 17, 2009 - 5 comment(s) - tags: open source, php, symfony, crisis, enterpriseThis 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.
posted on March 16, 2009 - 0 comment(s) - tags: conference, php, symfony, refactoringSo, 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).
posted on March 1, 2009 - 3 comment(s) - tags: symfony, php, conference, phpuk2009, londonphpUnderControl 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.
posted on February 8, 2009 - 2 comment(s) - tags: continuous integration, symfony, php, lime, phpunit, symfonyUnderControlPlugin, phpUnderControl, ibuildingsEver 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.
posted on January 26, 2009 - 16 comment(s) - tags: php, static, public, symfonyIn 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.
posted on January 21, 2009 - 2 comment(s) - tags: symfony, php, conference, londonThis 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!
posted on January 16, 2009 - 2 comment(s) - tags: dpc, dpc09, php, symfony, conference, talk, cfpAs 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.
posted on December 29, 2008 - 0 comment(s) - tags: 2008, php, symfony, year, left on the webAs 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...
posted on December 22, 2008 - 0 comment(s) - tags: symfony, jobeet, documentation, phpI'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 
Francois Zaninotto, one of the two authors of the symfony book and a former core team member of symfony, announced yesterday that he is fully stopping active contributions to symfony. Even though it is always a shame to have less contributors, it is not the disaster that some people may think.
posted on October 31, 2008 - 4 comment(s) - tags: symfonyContinuous 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.
posted on October 19, 2008 - 6 comment(s) - tags: continuous integration, php, symfony, phpUnderControlWith 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...
posted on October 9, 2008 - 15 comment(s) - tags: symfony, php, subversion, freeze, portabilitySo 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.
posted on September 25, 2008 - 5 comment(s) - tags: php, symfony, ibuildings, phpnwAt SymfonyCamp last weekend I did a session on Debugging with Symfony. The slides for that presentation are available on slideshare , or here...
posted on September 16, 2008 - 3 comment(s) - tags: presentation, slides, php, symfony, symfonycampAfter 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.
posted on August 24, 2008 - 1 comment(s) - tags: symfony, php, event, symfonycampToday 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.
posted on August 13, 2008 - 5 comment(s) - tags: DbFinderPlugin, ORM, symfony, phpLast 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.
posted on August 9, 2008 - 1 comment(s) - tags: symfony, php, communityOver at the company weblog of my employer Ibuildings , I've written a small highlighting of what I feel are the coolest new features in symfony 1.1.
posted on July 29, 2008 - 0 comment(s) - tags: symfony, ibuildings, metaWhile 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.
posted on July 8, 2008 - 2 comment(s) - tags: php, symfony, zemanta, http, open sourceLast 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.
posted on June 10, 2008 - 6 comment(s) - tags: event, conference, php, dpc, symfonyEven 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.
posted on May 18, 2008 - 1 comment(s) - tags: php, symfony, javascript, graceful degradation, usability, accessibilityRecently 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...
posted on May 8, 2008 - 0 comment(s) - tags: symfony, php, getting real, agile, decoratorWhen 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.
posted on May 4, 2008 - 0 comment(s) - tags: book, review, ruby on rails, symfony, getting real, methodology, agileBoth last saturday and this saturday I did presentations on symfony. They were mostly the same presentation, slightly different.
posted on April 12, 2008 - 3 comment(s) - tags: symfony, presentations, nllgg, pfcongrez, phpI 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.
posted on March 9, 2008 - 3 comment(s) - tags: symfony, left on the webI 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.
posted on March 1, 2008 - 0 comment(s) - tags: symfony, php, tipsAside 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.
posted on February 22, 2008 - 0 comment(s) - tags: php, symfony, event, left on the web, conferenceLast 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!
posted on February 21, 2008 - 0 comment(s) - tags: php, symfony, DPC2008, ibuildings, zend, conference, eventYou 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.
posted on February 19, 2008 - 4 comment(s) - tags: symfony, caching, phpIn 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.
posted on January 30, 2008 - 11 comment(s) - tags: symfony, deployment, phpSteer 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.
posted on January 21, 2008 - 1 comment(s) - tags: symfony, php, cms, steer, open sourceDue 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.
posted on January 18, 2008 - 0 comment(s) - tags: symfony, phpabstract, php, technology, podcastLately 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.
posted on January 8, 2008 - 1 comment(s) - tags: symfony, phpOn 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.
posted on December 11, 2007 - 0 comment(s) - tags: symfonySecond 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.
posted on November 11, 2007 - 3 comment(s) - tags: symfonyAs 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.
posted on October 28, 2007 - 0 comment(s) - tags: symfonyIn a terrible spur of symfony community productivity, I just also finished the dutch translation of the My First Project tutorial for symfony.
posted on October 4, 2007 - 0 comment(s) - tags: symfonyI've just launched a public beta of the symfony-framework.nl website. It's a website advocating the use of symfony.
posted on October 4, 2007 - 1 comment(s) - tags: symfonyLast 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.
posted on September 24, 2007 - 2 comment(s) - tags: symfonyLast week was SymfonyCamp, a three-day event around the symfony framework. It was amazing.
posted on September 10, 2007 - 11 comment(s) - tags: symfonyFor 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.
posted on August 13, 2007 - 6 comment(s) - tags: symfonyEarlier 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.
posted on July 18, 2007 - 3 comment(s) - tags: symfony
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