Archive for the 'Tips and tricks' Category

A Symfony Quickie: Finding a File

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

It’s been a while, but I’ve finally made the plunge and did the first in the series of cookbook-related screencast tutorials for Symfony. http://www.vimeo.com/1209869 Edit: here’s the gist of the video. == The sfFinder class == Symfony comes bundled with the sfFinder class that lets you conveniently search for files and directories. It has a simple fluent interface that […]

Installing Symfony 1.1 SVN and Symfony 1.0 PEAR packages side-by-side: A Windows Vista How-To (and XP, too)

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008

As a tie-in to this excellent how-to for installing both versions of Symfony, I’ve decided to extend the method to apply to Vista as well. EDIT: Symlinks don’t work this way because of the working directory being in C:\PHP where the symlink is located. See below for modified instructions. First, check out the SVN branch for 1.1 […]

Tired of setting up your presentation/testing environment?

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

Yeah, I’ve been away a while, had no time to update this blog, but still have been active on freenode’s #symfony channel. Just a quick tip for anyone interested or looking for a better solution than XAMP - it’s called The Uniform Server. It unzips into a convenient folder anywhere on your computer and sits there […]

Reaching deep into the I18n core

Wednesday, October 17th, 2007

When creating truly internationalized content, you need to think of a few things - first, what country your are in, and secondly, what the locale is in that country. Why should you care? User input. While Symfony does have handy features via sfI18N, it doesn’t expose some of the methods needed to correctly parse strings. While […]

More gotchas from the Symfony world

Monday, July 23rd, 2007

Well, it seems there’s a few other things that aren’t as they seem in Symfony - if they’re expected or not, they are things I’ve noticed and needed a few minutes (or in a another case) or just over two hours to figure out. All of them have to do with Symfony’s output escaper using PHPView. […]

RobotReplay, a usability testing tool

Saturday, July 14th, 2007

If you’ve ever asked yourself just why your web site or web app doesn’t perform as well as you’ve thought it would, since you’ve given a lot thought into the design of the page and user interface, then you might ask yourself - are you the proper person to be judging the design? In comes usability […]

A PHP gotcha within Symfony

Friday, June 22nd, 2007

There’s an interesting aspect about using functions within partials, which I’ve written about before - the existence of functions and the dangers of redeclaring them. The problem here is using partial-specific functions within partials. We’ve had an instance where we needed a function to solve a recursive problem when displaying data within the partial (a complex […]

Using jQuery to manipulate a foreign DOM

Sunday, May 20th, 2007

This is somewhat of an old topic, but digging through a myriad of ways of including jQuery into a website that doesn’t use it (eg. Wordpress having Prototype and such), I stumbled upon a bookmarklet written by John Resig that loads jQuery into the current DOM and enables you to run an onload function that […]

Easier I18n XLIFF message generation

Friday, May 11th, 2007

If you’re like me and you don’t trust yourself to catch all of the breadcrumbs you leave behind you, you tend to rely on an arsenal of tools to keep you in check. This is especially true with XLIFF and Symfony. There’s an i18n generation script that scans your actions, YAMLs and templates for the use […]

A list of handy browser-specific CSS selectors

Monday, April 2nd, 2007

Well, not exactly breaking front page news, but I thought I’d share this handy library of CSS selectors for targeting specific browsers: CSS Hacks