fidzu : PHP frameworks

Symfony 2.0.10 has just been released:

• Twig has been updated to 1.6.0 (which fixes a bug when using Assetic in the production environment);

• Doctrine has been updated to their latest minor versions;

• And as always, some minor bugs has been fixed.

The CHANGELOG has all the details about the changes done in this release and you can also have a look at the full diff.

If you are starting a new project, you can get the Symfony Standard Edition distribution on the download page.

If you already have a project based on the Symfony Standard Edition 2.0.x, you can easily upgrade to 2.0.10 by getting the new deps and deps.lock files.

Then, run the vendors script (it also clears your cache):

$ ./bin/vendors install

Remember that the Symfony2 Components are also available as standalone libraries. You can get them via their dedicated read-only repositories on Github (https://github.com/symfony/Finder for instance), install them via PEAR (pear install symfony2/Finder), or even install them via Composer.

06 Feb 2012 11:35am GMT

This week, Symfony2 master branch committed a ton of fixes, tweaks and refactorizations related to Form and Validation components. In addition, Symfony2 official repository achieved a very remarkable milestone: 1,000 forks.

Development mailing list

• A note on PR reviews
• Doctrine/entityManager memory leaks

Symfony2 development highlights

Master branch:

• a676598, 57cc531: [Form] added class LazyChoiceList
• 307f17d: [FrameworkBundle] code factorization in TraceableEventDispatcher
• 5aa5987: [Form] fixed form children are always validated in group Default
• dbd3a1b: [Security] allowed unsetting parentAcl on MutableAclInterface
• 1678a3d: [Validator] fixed Validator::validateValue() propagates empty validation root instead of the provided value
• 1dd302c: [Validator] fixed ConstraintViolationList::__toString() to not include dots in the output if the root is empty
• f904a9e: [Validator] fixed GraphWalker does not add constraint violation if error message is empty
• a103c28: [Validator] the Collection constraint adds 'missing' and 'extra' errors to the individual fields now
• de253dd: [Form] added read_only and disabled attributes
• fe85bbd: [Validator] simplified ExecutionContext::addViolation() and added ExecutionContext::addViolationAt()
• a30a679: [Validator] made ExecutionContext immutable and introduced new class GlobalExecutionContext
• 9153f0e: [Validator] deprecated ConstraintValidator methods setMessage(), getMessageTemplate() and getMessageParameters()
• 3c28ab7, c373d5b: [Routing] no prefix is required to override imported RouteCollections
• e9b4c58: [Console] enable process isolantion in shell
• 7cecb4e: [Form] added support for parent of FormBuilder
• 2e4ebe4: [Validator] renamed methods addViolationAtRelativePath() and getAbsolutePropertyPath() in ExecutionContext
• 7837f50: [Form] added FormUtil::singularify()
• 49d1464: [Form] implemented MergeCollectionListener which calls addXxx() and removeXxx() in your model if found
• 9b0245b: [Form] made prefix of adder and remover method configurable
• 9a4e22e: [Form] disallowed infinity in NumberToLocalizedStringTransformer
• d208f4e: [Form] made it possible to use models with only either addXxx() or removeXxx()
• b393774: [Form] used direct method access in MergeCollectionListener instead of Reflection to avoid problems when using class hierarchies
• 02f61ad: [Form] renamed choice and collection options 'adder_prefix' and 'remover_prefix' to 'add_method' and 'remove_method' and allowed to specify full method names
• 8dc40e4, 4847d3a: [FrameworkBundle] added config:dump-reference console command
• 58939f1, 9757958, 2f8ad93, fa32885: added configuration docs for TwigBundle (reverted)
• bd461e2: [Form] forms now don't create empty objects anymore if they are completely empty and not required. The empty data for these forms is null
• 0753cee: [Form] fixed read_only attribute for expanded fields

2.0.x branch:

• a1b6d4c: [DependencyInjection] added a failing testcase for escaped % in array parameters
• 048fc2f: [Form] fixed broken MoneyType test for JPY
• 8e13095, a7b48c0: [DependencyInjection] fixed the unescaping of parameters to handle arrays

Repository summary: 3,869 watchers (#1 in PHP, #28 overall) and 1000 forks (#1 in PHP, #11 overall).

Updated plugins

• apostrophe:
  • fixed bug that caused page forms not to work
  • refactored getEmbedCode() so it doesn't instantiate embed services twice and doesn't crash if the service URL is bogus and the width and height aren't known
  • don't cache non-200 OK responses, it leads to SEO problems
  • refactored nonrecursive version of aFiles::rmRf
• apostropheBlog:
  • fix for XSS attack

They talked about us

• symfony range filter
• Silex: getting your project structure right
• Doctrine Sluggable and Transliteration
• Créez votre propre framework ... avec les composants Symfony2 (partie 10)
• Silex and MongoDB simply
• Loading Yaml Fixtures in Symfony2 and Doctrine2
• Une semaine symfonique #265 - du 23 au 29 janvier 2012
• Servicios REST usando Silex micro-framework 2/2
• Créez votre propre framework ... avec les composants Symfony2 (partie 11)
• Silex: set up your project for testing with PHPUnit
• Security - symfony 2 Tutorial - webdev's Blog
• symfonyでバッチ処理
• Symfony Plugin #1: Act As Sortable
• Dynamic embedded forms in symfony
• Reset database before phpunit tests in Symfony2
• Symfony 1.4 Doctrine 1.2 MS SQL Server
• Symfony 2 auf dem Mac einrichten
• [symfony] HTMLタグを含む文字列をエスケープせずに出力する
• Symfony2 ExtJS generator - Uigen - (1. update) - type recognition
• How to reduce admin generator query in Symfony 1.4
• Symfony build model error: Unable to return affix for unknown CreoleType
• Login en Symfony sin usar sfGuardPlugin
• Form choice filter auto sort by name
• symfonyはじめました-symfonyのインストール
• Autenticazione con Facebook in applicazioni Symfony
• Symfony including extra libraries or classes
• Symfony 2 vs Code Igniter
• PHPメンターズ -> Symfonyで複雑なバリデーションを行う方法

06 Feb 2012 9:24am GMT

This week, time, logger and Doctrine collectors were tweaked and refactored. Meanwhile, the Form component fixed lots of bugs, specially with the improvements of ChoiceListInterface and its implementations.

Development mailing list

• Call for volunteers for Netbeans Sf2 plugin development

Symfony2 development highlights

Master branch:

• 3b260d2: refactored the collector to separate the loggers per connection
• e37783f: [DoctrineBridge] refactored the query sanitization in the collector
• 2a998e0: [FrameworkBundle] handle disabled csrf protection in the PHP templating form helper
• 3a1699a: handle disabled csrf protection in the Twig FormExtension
• 87b16e7: [Form] greatly improved ChoiceListInterface and all of its implementations (EntityChoiceList was adapted, the methods getEntities(), getEntitiesByByKeys(), getIdentifier() and getIdentifierValues() were removed/made private. Instead of the first two you can use getChoices() and getChoicesByValues(), for the latter two no replacement exists. ArrayChoiceList was replaced by SimpleChoiceList. PaddedChoiceList, MonthChoiceList and TimezoneChoiceList were removed. Their functionality was merged into DateType, TimeType and TimezoneType)
• e1fc5a5: [Form] restricted form names to specific characters to fix generation of HTML IDs and to avoid problems with property paths
• f533ef0: [Form] added ChoiceView class for passing choice-related data to the view
• 43e0db5: [DomCrawler] add support for multivalued form fields
• 399af27: [Form] implemented checks to assert that values and indices generated in choice lists match their requirements
• ed9c348: [Security] Authentication(Success|Failure)Handler can now return null
• 2dd4bf1, c3f637b: [Form] support for PATCH method in forms
• d4300b9, b879397: [WebProfilerBundle] tweak the time view
• a52c675: [WebProfilerBundle] improved the logger panel

2.0.x branch:

• 7f96c8a: [HttpKernel] prevent php script execution in cached ESI pages using HttpCache
• c3f0ec7: [DoctrineBundle] made DoctrineBundle fowards compatible with Doctrine 2.2

Repository summary: 3,830 watchers (#1 in PHP, #27 overall) and 983 forks (#1 in PHP, #11 overall).

Updated plugins

• dcReloadedFormExtra:
  • added a uniquenes checker widget that checks the uniqueness of a value using an Ajax callback
• sfSyncContent:
  • created default parameters for sync content to be frontend dev FROM prod@production
• apostrophe:
  • added an app.yml option to return email links in a different format that allows apostrophe.unobfuscateEmailInline to be called outside of the a_js spool
  • all unlink() and rmdir() calls in the product now invoke aFiles::unlink() and aFiles::rmdir(), providing a capability to override these methods
  • the aFiles class has been refactored into a BaseaFiles? class and an empty aFiles subclass, allowing convenient overrides
  • a_button helper now accepts a single array of options as an alternative to the full list of parameters
  • slideshows are allowed to have the crossfade transition now even if they have no height specified
  • fixed event bug in menutoggle script and added jQuery 1.7 to the plugin
  • annotation of multiple media items works again
• apostropheBlog:
  • added a 'first' class to the first pager in the blog index

They talked about us

• deSymfony 2012 inicia su call for papers
• Create your own framework ... on top of the Symfony2 Components (part 11)
• Une semaine symfonique #264 - du 16 au 22 janvier 2012
• symfony forward through LAN
• Use virtuals forms with Symfony2
• Create your own framework ... on top of the Symfony2 Components (part 12)
• sqlite w środowisku developerskim w symfony i symfony2
• Load fixtures with Symfony2 and YAML files
• Onde encontrar Bundles para o Symfony2
• Notes: Symfony 2 (一)
• Nazwa.pl, PostgreSQL i Symfony
• Recording 'Last Activity' for Users in Symfony2 + FOSUserBundle
• Get started with Symfony in Amazon Cloud
• symfony schema.yml の覚書
• Symfony YAML MySQL Workbench Plugin
• Symfony 1.4 Admin Generator - Aktuelles Objekt in Partial
• Uso de sfWidgetFormJQueryDate (datepicker) en Symfony
• Symfony meets APC (Alternative PHP Cache)
• Сайт за масла - голямото предизвикателство решено със Symfony

30 Jan 2012 4:19pm GMT

Here at Zend we get a lot of good press for our products. We don't want to turn DevZone into just a feed for those that write cool things about us, but some of these are helpful if you are considering using our products. So instead of flooding your feed with individual articles about how great the products are, occasionally we'll post a roundup. That way they won't get in your way, but there are here when you need them.

30 Jan 2012 2:37pm GMT

Want to check your file uploads with ClamAV? We've got a link to a tutorial to show you how.

27 Jan 2012 2:50pm GMT

Three days ago I received my copy of Inc magazine. I was scanning through it and low and behold there is a 1/4 page blurb about Pancake App! Phil is a leader within the CodeIgniter community and a member of the Reactor Team so I was very excited to see this. After doing some research I found that we have never done a showcase on Pancake App so this entry is to make that right. Congratulations to Phil, Lee, Bruno and Adam! You guys deserve the recognition that Inc. Magazine is bringing you.

Tell us a little about Phil and Lee.

Lee Tengum is a PHP developer with a keen eye for design. I am a long-time CodeIgniter user and contributor who also likes to build distributed applications. We make a good team, as I couldn't design a website to save my life and I have plenty of experience building backend systems.

How did you two come to work together?

We've been working together on various projects for years now after we crossed paths on the CodeIgniter forums back in 2007. Lee built a very simple CMS which I ended up buying and that CMS became the great grandaddy of PyroCMS. Since then there have been a few client projects we've worked on and while Lee is a talented programmer we generally split the work as Lee on UI and myself on the main development. About a year ago Lee started building a simple internal application to collect payments from a difficult client.

After showing it to a few different people they were interested and wanted more features added in, which was when Lee decided to migrate the code to CodeIgniter and get more people involved. Throughout Pancakes lifetime it has had contributions from several prominent CodeIgniter developers and the team currently consists of Lee, Bruno De Barros, Adam Jackett and myself.

What can you tell us about the app in general?

I like to describe PancakeApp as a freelancers sidekick. PancakeApp handles the full project life-cycle from Proposal to Payment. You can draft Proposals and send them to your client, who can then accept or reject until an iteration is agreed on, all from within the app. That saves a lot of PDF emailing! With the Proposal agreed upon you can make a Project, add Milestones and Tasks and even track time against each task. You can generate invoices based on the Projects which automatically take all your tasks and tracked time into consideration, so your Project is instantly turned into line items and totals. You can of course also create invoices from scratch. The invoices are sent to the client who then has multiple options of paying based on what you've enabled in the settings, so you can take money via PayPal, Authorize.net, Bank Transfer or even accept cash; instructions will be listed on the invoice.

You might be thinking of a hosted service that sounds similar too, but PancakeApp is not a hosted service. It's a single payment to download the software and then it's all yours to go on your own server. No worries about other companies having your client details, no monthly fees, just one payment.

There is one last thing that makes PancakeApp awesome: Auto-updating. If you turn this feature on in the control panel, PancakeApp will upgrade in the background as soon as we release a new version. You don't need to keep logging into your FTP server to replace files or worry about running an upgrade script, we send out a HTTP notification to installations to grab the new files and CodeIgniter Migrations take care of the database changes.

I know you are on the Reactor team but when building something major like this you can build it using anything. So what was your major consideration in using CodeIgniter for this?

The most obvious answer would be that both me and Lee know the framework well and have been using it a long time, but the main reason is that CodeIgniter is currently the most simple and most portable framework around. While some frameworks undergo large rewrites to implement the very latest PHP 5.3 features, CodeIgniter maintains backwards compatibility for older servers meaning it is perfect for distributed applications in two ways: 1) We won't have to re-write PancakeApp in a year, it has already gone from 1.7.x to 2.1.0 without a hitch, but also 2) it will work on PHP 5.1.6 servers. While as developers we have probably all upgraded any servers in our control to PHP 5.3 and are trying to convince our clients to upgrade theirs, when you release a distributed application like PancakeApp it has to work in as many places as possible and CodeIgniter makes that incredibly simple. After-all if we used a PHP 5.3-only framework and 30% of servers are still on PHP 5.2, we've just reduced our target market by 30%!

What is next on the plate for pancake app? Any additional functionality you can tell us about?

There are some brilliant features coming for PancakeApp at the moment. We've just finished up some improvements to User Management and Permissions meaning that you can add plenty of users with varying levels of access, and there are plans to improve the existing REST API even more to allow for more integration with other services.

Do you have any other information you'd like to share with the community? Tips from this project you'd like to share? Lessons you've learned?

The API is something I really wish I'd focused on more at the start. It is a well-known developer habbit to build an application or website then add the API in as more of an after-thought. While we are happy to have an API if we'd build it first and used it as a core for the system (much like Twitter does for example) then we'd have been able to make it much more powerful and have web features and API features keep up with each other without duplication of effort.

A positive lesson we learned was open, honest, personal customer support. While PancakeApp was still in its first year we had a few users on Twitter and in various forums make some complaints that certain features were not included. While some developers would take a defensive position, we admitted there was room for improvement and engaged them in conversation. Those users who complained all now have a PancakeApp license and have become some of our best evangelists. It's thanks to users like this that PancakeApp has started to spread and we even got quite a big mention in Inc Magazine this month!*

25 Jan 2012 4:56pm GMT

This week, Form and Validator were the most active components on the Symfony2 master branch. First, the CollectionValidator introduced new Optional and Required constraints. Second, the validation of form children was made configurable, meaning that child forms now aren't validated anymore by default (bc-break change).

Symfony2 development highlights

Master branch:

• 6641f3e, bf59018, 509c7bf, e6e3da5: [Validator] added constraints Optional and Required for the CollectionValidator
• 0c70a41, 43293f4: [Form] made validation of form children configurable. Set the option cascade_validation to true if you need it
• 0c18324: [HttpKernel] added extra information when collecting data from an object if that object implements a __toString()
• 693d1ec: [Form] do not render default ID attribute on empty form name
• 15c666b, d2a0c74, 9e55cda: added a recover-timeout option to allow recovering messages that have taken too long to send
• 0b7e2e0: support for DELETE method in forms
• 0513eb1: [Form] pass translation domain to the sub-forms when choice list is expanded

2.0.x branch:

• cacc880: [Locale] fixed incomplete Locale data loading (sublocales returned only incomplete results for getDisplayCountries(), getDisplayLanguages() and getDisplayLocales())
• 959614b: use reflection to determine the correct path for component validation.xml file
• a1317c3: [Locale] fixed breaking tests if 'intl' extension is not installed
• 1f733e1: updated Serbian translation for validators

Repository summary: 3,787 watchers (#1 in PHP, #26 overall) and 973 forks (#1 in PHP, #11 overall).

New plugins

• asJqueryTreePropelManager: (no description)
• sfCpGrid: is a javascript based backend for Symfony. It loads the recordset from the db via ajax, can sort it on the fly, it checks periodically if there is something new, it allows filtering and search, and to have custom buttons and related actions.

Updated plugins

• sfGearman:
  • allow to namespaces function for mutualized gearmand
• apostrophe:
  • slight change in linkage on aImage placeholders
  • fixed bug with placeholder clicker box that looks for the choose button url in the correct place for both slots in areas and singleton slots
  • smart slideshow passes new 'clickToSelect => false' option to placeholder, which prevents a 404 if you click the placeholder area on a smart slideshow
  • factored out the slideshow slot code that relinks the related media items into a separate method so it can be easily called from overrides
• apostropheBlog:
  • slot help text doesn't need to get output to logged out visitors
  • changed the check to editor privileges

They talked about us

• Create your own framework ... on top of the Symfony2 Components (part 8)
• Создаем собственный фреймворк на основе Symfony2. (Часть 2)
• Une semaine symfonique #263 - du 9 au 15 janvier 2012
• Создаем собственный фреймворк на основе Symfony2. (Часть 3)
• Se publica Symfony 2.0.9
• Create your own framework ... on top of the Symfony2 Components (part 9)
• Paris PHPCR meetup
• Symfony 2 - Veritabani Icin Baslangic Verileri Olusturmak - Doctrine Fixtures
• Deploying SF2 Projects on Plesk VPS.
• Создаем собственный фреймворк на основе Symfony2. (Часть 4)
• Create your own framework ... on top of the Symfony2 Components (part 10)
• Les services, théorie et création
• Разбор аннотаций Symfony2
• Intégrer facilement un blog à votre application Symfony - WordPress, Drupal, Joomla ...
• Sortie de Symfony 2.0.9
• Административный интерфейс с SonataAdminBundle
• Documentação do Symfony 2 em português
• Git and first Symfony2 project in NetBeans
• Symfony: short commands in terminal
• [symfony] javascriptの読み込み位置(use_javascript と include_javascripts)
• Les services, utilisation poussée
• Drupal8 und Symfony2 gehen gemeinsame Wege!
• Symfony 1.4, 1.3 űrlapok és ajax validáció
• Symfony2 & Mercurial
• Symfony2, best IDE support?
• Symfony meets APC (Alternative PHP Cache)
• rails 3.1 vs Symfony2 - my first comparison

23 Jan 2012 1:49pm GMT

What can you tell us about the team that built ZoomShift?

Zoomshift is a rather young 4-person team composed of 2 developers, a designer, and a sales and content person. Our team is very tight knit and incredibly passionate about entrepreneurship and technology. We are strong believers in lean methodology and are constantly searching for new technologies to set our product apart. We all agree that we can't see ourselves doing anything else. We love what we do and have a strong passion for entrepreneurship.

What can you tell us about the site in general? What are the goals of the site and the main audience?

The idea for ZoomShift was born from experience working in the service industry. From serving tables to selling tickets we realized first-hand that employee scheduling can be an absolute nightmare for many organizations. After doing some research we were unable to find a solution that was intuitive, affordable, and truly simplified the scheduling process. In turn, we decided to build ZoomShift with the goal of making scheduling simple for both employees and managers. Our vision for ZoomShift has always been very focused with the mentality that less is more. We focus on the core functionality of online employee scheduling and purposefully leave out all of the extra features that many other solutions provide.

Currently, we have customers ranging from restaurants and hotels to volunteer organizations and small medical clinics. ZoomShift is not designed to fit one specific industry, but rather it is intended to work for any organization that needs to schedule employees hourly. We love that our customers are other small businesses and from their feedback we are constantly finding new ways to make scheduling even simpler.

What was your major consideration in using CodeIgniter?

Choosing CodeIgniter was an easy decision for us. We wanted a lightweight and flexible framework that was relatively easy to learn. From a development perspective we didn't want to be confined, and we knew that we would be needing to extend the framework quite a bit. CodeIgniter offered us a solid foundation in MVC that we could then comfortably build on top of. Also, it was incredibly important to us that the framework was well documented. The documentation was evidence to us that CodeIgniter was polished and built with care. We clearly made the right decision with CodeIgniter. It's simple, not bloated, and suitable for the pro down to the novice.

What is next on the plate for ZoomShift? Any additional functionality.

Mobile is next. We have been waiting to pull the trigger on mobile development for a few months now. We really wanted to dial in the core feature set of the application before turning our focus to mobile. Now that we have a steady customer base and have validated our core features it is time to push onto mobile. While the current application runs smoothly on mobile browsers we want to offer our customers a native application for iOS and Android.

Do you have any other information you'd like to share with the community?

Build a strong team. It is the team behind a product that makes it great, and an idea is only worth something if you have the team to execute it. Finding a group of talented individuals that share a passion is incredibly powerful. Do what you love, talk about what you love, and go where other people are doing what you love. If you immerse yourself and reach out to others you will naturally build relationships with people that think like you do. These relationships will be a source of energy and inspiration as well as an incredible source of knowledge. Do what you love and make friends.

20 Jan 2012 8:47pm GMT

This week, Symfony2 master branch committed an important security-related and backwards-incompatible change: moved user comparison logic out of UserInterface. In addition, the winners of the first Symfony Community Awards were announced.

Symfony2 development highlights

Master branch:

• 9386583, 56db4a1, 3682f62, 9d3a49f, d7ffeb5, 2a74ac3: [Security] moved user comparison logic out of UserInterface (BC break)
• ef6297a, a7f857d, 1ad3d86, f750e54, defdac6: removed a lot of unused variables
• c0ad1ac: [HttpKernel] minor fixes in the Stopwatch
• 348a3c6: [TwigBridge] use reflection to get guess the file path for form resources

2.0.x branch:

• b7a8f6d: harmonized commands descriptions
• 0507840: prevent parameters from overwriting the template filename
• 127cf52: [FrameworkBundle] updated Slovak validator messages
• 253eeba, 7f7c2a7: [Validator] fix for PHP incosistent behaviour of ArrayAccess
• fe62401: optimized string starts with checks (doing this with strpos() is slightly faster than substr())
• 7f7f82a: [HttpKernel] removed unnecessary regex
• efce640, 7961014: [Yaml] throw an exception if not readable
• d67d419: [HttpFoundation] added missing trustProxy condition
• af32590: [FrameworkBundle] use only _route_params to generate redirect routes

Repository summary: 3,748 watchers (#1 in PHP, #25 overall) and 965 forks (#1 in PHP, #11 overall).

Updated plugins

• cpTcpdf:
  • fixed watermark to support landscape page orientation
• sfDoctrineActAsTaggable:
  • pkInlineTaggableWidget sends change() events to the widget being enhanced
• apostrophe:
  • button slots have a new editLink option, which defaults to true. If you set it explicitly to false, the link field does not appear in the form
  • button slot edit forms default to the title and link that were passed in by the template now, if any, rather than being initially blank
  • the "You are still editing content. Are you sure you want to leave this page?" message is not displayed if the slot has the .a-no-unload-warning class
  • aMediaItemTable::getEmbedCode now accepts an 'alt' option that overrides the use of the media item's title as the alt attribute
• apostropheBlog:
  • blog and event metadata forms track whether they have unsaved changes, so the new apostrophe.onBeforeUnload method in a.js can ask them

They talked about us

• Create your own framework... on top of the Symfony2 Components (part 4)
• Feature flags with Symfony2
• Une semaine symfonique #261 - du 26 décembre 2011 au 1 janvier 2012
• Create your own framework... on top of the Symfony2 Components (part 5)
• Introduction to Symfony2 talk at the South Florida PHP Users Group
• Создаем собственный фреймворк на основе Symfony2. (Часть 1)
• Une semaine symfonique #262 - du 2 au 8 janvier 2012
• Anunciados los ganadores de los Premios de la Comunidad Symfony 2011
• The Symfony2 Serializer Component: create a Normalizer for JSON class hinting
• Mocking Symfony Container services in Behat scenarios with Mockery
• Apprendre Symfony2: Les validateurs dans le framework sf2
• Create your own framework... on top of the Symfony2 Components (part 6)
• Utiliser les forms virtuals avec Symfony2
• 使用Symfony2的组件创建自己的PHP框架（第四部分）
• Checkout management bundle for Symfony 2
• symfony-1.4を試す(2) - プロジェクト
• My First RESTful Web Service with Symfony2 Part I
• Symfony 2: Inte bara ett framework
• Symfony 2 Framework PHP WEB
• Fully isolated tests in Symfony2
• How to Change the Database Schema for Symfony
• Vespolina: The Sandbox Story 4 - composer.json To The Rescue!
• Create your own framework... on top of the Symfony2 Components (part 7)
• Перемещаем панель дебага
• I just love Symfony Components!
• Symfony　インストールメモ
• Tutoriel Vidéo Symfony 2 : Introduction à Symfony 2
• Utiliser un Validator dans un Form\Type Symfony2
• Symfonyのオートロード、ヘルパー、スタイルシートの読み込み
• Il Symfony Live 2012 diventa sempre più concreto

16 Jan 2012 9:33pm GMT

Here we are. The long awaited results of the first Symfony Community Awards are here. Don't scroll down yet! Please get your tuxedo first.

Nearly 300 members of the community voted for who they think deserve to be honored by their work. This year, a special emphasis was given on support and evangelism. These two topics are key to a sustainable development of our community.

We would like to thank you for your commitment and the hard work you're doing to make the Symfony community strong and proud.

Enough writing, here are the results:

• 2011 Best Blogger: Javier Eguiluz
• 2011 Best Mailing List Support: Christophe Coevoet
• 2011 Best Forum Support: Jon Hinks
• 2011 Best IRC Support: Dustin Dobervich
• 2011 Best Evangelist: Lukas Kahwe Smith
• 2011 Best Contributor: Ryan Weaver
• 2011 Personality of the year: Fabien Potencier

Keep up the good work and see you next year for another edition of the community awards.

12 Jan 2012 4:48pm GMT

There's a new survey series worth checking out called the Zend Developer Pulse™. Zend is taking the pulse of developers regarding technology and career topics. Findings from the first survey, conducted online in Q4 2011, are available in a summary report. Zend received over 3,000 responses in 48 hours. Not bad. Take a peek at the report, and send your feedback to Zend.

11 Jan 2012 3:48pm GMT

This week, the upcoming Symfony 2.1 version removed DoctrineBundle as it was migrated to the Doctrine organization. Meanwhile, Symfony2 components unveiled their brand-new documentation section. Lastly, Symfony 2.0.9 maintenance version was published to address some minor problems in 2.0.8.

Development mailing list

• IRC Meeting week #1/2012
• Flash messages vs. notification system

Symfony2 development highlights

Master branch:

• 2f47cca: [Propel1] added a PropelExtension. The propel extension allow to use propel specific type (ModelType) outside of Symfony2
• 254e49b: [FrameworkBundle] removed the possibility to pass a non-scalar attributes when calling render() to make the call works with or without a reverse proxy
• cadf3d4: [HttpKernel] fixed doubled results for the file profiler
• 789d5ad: [FrameworkBundle] allowed attributes of the render() method to be arrays
• c73e034: [TwigBridge] added missing transchoice filters when extracting translations from templates
• 7424e62: [TwigBridge] moved the default value for the translation domain to the Node compilation
• 2a5758f: [TwigBridge] allow the domain translation to be null when calling the trans and transchoice filters
• ce6399e: [TwigBridge] added a way to specify a default domain for a Twig template (via the 'trans_default_domain' tag)
• dcf209a: [DoctrineBundle] removed the bundle (migrated to the Doctrine organization)
• 83c23ca, 7ae9348: [HttpFoundation, Streaming] document and test that Transfer-Encoding is absent and do not set a Transfer-Encoding header of chunked
• f4890c2: [Translation] Po/MoFileLoader parse plurization rules
• 0ed3497: [FrameworkBundle] updated Catalan validator translations
• dcee6ff: [TwigBridge] improved test coverage
• 7e7244e: [Form] enabled empty root form name

2.0.x branch:

• 261325d: cast $query['params'] to array to ensure it is a valid argument when $query['params'] is null
• 208c2e4: removed the version attribute in all composer.json files
• 0492290: [Console] added a missing method
• 4f9b9eb, 3e9d937: released 2.0.9 version
• 9441c46: [DependencyInjection] fixed PhpDumper

Repository summary: 3,707 watchers (#1 in PHP, #24 overall) and 957 forks (#1 in PHP, #12 overall).

Updated plugins

• cpTcpdf:
  • fixed watermark
• sw2DecorationToolkit:
  • you now can have permissions on menu items so that they are not shown
  • updated the readme for the advanced case of having attributes
• sfSphinx:
  • enhanced test script
• apostrophe:
  • added hasSlotType() to pluginapage and pluginaarea so I can ask either if they contain a slot type
  • a.js has a global function called aLog() that's shorter and easier to type than apostrophe.log
  • added aMediaAdmin class to media pages in the backend
  • fixed defaults for cropping an image in a previously saved slideshow that was not cropped on the first save make no sense
  • added a new 'uncropped' option to the aSlideshowSlot/slideshow component
  • reconstructed the audio player to accommodate flexible columns
  • new 'prepend' option to aAssets::compileLessIfNeeded() and aAssets::cexecute() specifies LESS code to be prepended to the content of the file to be compiled
• apostropheBlog:
  • app.yml setting to show excerpts in the blog index page

They talked about us

• Symfony2 - Un tutoriel pour débuter avec le framework Symfony2
• Creating an environment for Symfony2 - Part 1
• Symfony2: dynamically add routes
• Create your own framework... on top of the Symfony2 Components (part 1)
• Nuevas ofertas de trabajo para programadores Symfony
• Create your own framework... on top of the Symfony2 Components (part 2)
• Symfony Live 2012
• Symfony2 Tuto: Les formulaires dans le framework Symfony 2
• Extending the Symfony2 session
• Form label translation in Symfony 2
• Create your own framework... on top of the Symfony2 Components (part 3)
• symfonyで非同期読み込みするcomponentヘルパーつくった。
• web女子のsymfony入門 symfonyってなんだろう？
• Optional translation form for I18n objects with Symfony and Doctrine
• symfony Cannot redeclare class で エラー
• My note for I18N Symfony Doctrine
• Symfony 2.0.9 veröffentlicht
• How to write host-aware Twig templates in Symfony
• How to dump arrays to different log files in Symfony?
• symfony 中 doctrine 的 Entity 自动生成 getter setter
• symfonyってなんだろう？
• symfony的一个bug：项目数据库密码中不能包含 '#'

09 Jan 2012 8:30pm GMT

Symfony 2.0.9 has been released earlier than expected to fix some annoying problems in 2.0.8:

• it comes with Twig 1.5.1, which fixes a regression that made the form_theme tag fail;

• it comes with a fix for the Filesystem class;

• the composer.json file for 2.0.8 had the wrong version in it.

The CHANGELOG has all the details about the changes done in this release and you can also have a look at the full diff.

If you are starting a new project, you can get the Symfony Standard Edition distribution on the download page.

If you already have a project based on the Symfony Standard Edition 2.0.x, you can easily upgrade to 2.0.9 by getting the new deps and deps.lock files.

Then, run the vendors script:

$ ./bin/vendors install

And don't forget to clear your cache:

$ php ./app/console cache:clear

Remember that the Symfony2 Components are also available as standalone libraries. You can get them via their dedicated read-only repositories on Github (https://github.com/symfony/Finder for instance), install them via PEAR (pear install symfony2/Finder), or even install them via Composer.

06 Jan 2012 7:46am GMT

If you visited us at Symfony Day Cologne or keep a close ear on the conversation around Symfony, then you already know that momentum and awareness is rapidly growing behind the components that make up Symfony. Sure, Symfony is a framework, but more fundamentally, it's a group of 20+ decoupled components, each of which can be used inside any PHP project (yes, even that old legacy app you maintain that just won't go away).

This flexibility is what makes things like Silex possible - a microframework built using several Symfony2 components. Drupal has also decided to adopt at least two of the Symfony components for Drupal 8 and feedback from their community has already been wonderful. The beauty is that this is exactly why the components where built: to be the basic building blocks of any PHP application or framework. The fact that they're also bringing different communities together is a great bonus.

But now we need your help! As a community, we've put a lot of work into the Symfony2 framework documentation. It's not perfect, but there's a lot of great resources. Now it's time to focus on documentation for the individual components.

Fabien already kicked things off by bootstrapping a new "components" section of the documentation. But there's a lot more to do! If you'd like to learn more about the Symfony2 components and give back at the same time, here's what you can do:

• Check out the components tag on the symfony-docs GitHub repository for a current list of pending items

• Choose a particular component, study its files, and bootstrap its docs! Follow the example of the other sections and get us started!

• Read the existing component documentation, try things out, and let us know how we can make things better.

The goal, of course, is for a developer to be able to install, setup, and use each component in a meaningful way just by reading through some friendly docs. Sure, we've got a ways to go, but with your help, we can get there soon!

And if you're still reading (nice work!), remember that each time you can't find documentation or read an error message that's just not clear enough, there are hundreds others just like you. But when you add those docs or improve that error message, you stop the cycle and save countless hours. That's the beauty of a community like ours. Thanks.

05 Jan 2012 7:11am GMT

The Symfony2 DoctrineBundle has been moved to the Doctrine organization. This allows the bundle to be maintained in a more decoupled way from Symfony for several reasons:

• No coupling of release cycles anymore;

• Move code to the organization that actually maintains it;

• Avoid Symfony suggesting Doctrine is the only way for persistence; Symfony wants to focus on providing the View and the Controller abstraction and not make suggestions about the Model.

The Symfony standard edition has been updated to reflect this change.

In your code, you will have to change references to the Doctrine classes; for instance, the Registry class must be changed from Symfony\Bundle\DoctrineBundle\Registry to Doctrine\Bundle\DoctrineBundle\Registry.

The DoctrineFixturesBundle, DoctrineMigrationsBundle and DoctrineMongoDBBundle are now maintained in the Doctrine organization as well; however forks have been created in the Symfony repository to make all the 2.0 apps out there backwards compatible (you just need to be check that your are using the 2.0 branch).

The new repositories are here:

• https://github.com/doctrine/DoctrineBundle
• https://github.com/doctrine/DoctrineMongoDBBundle
• https://github.com/doctrine/DoctrineFixturesBundle
• https://github.com/doctrine/DoctrineMigrationsBundle

You can find additional information about the move on the Doctrine blog.

02 Jan 2012 5:26pm GMT

Got your beta invite to phpcloud.com but not sure where to start. Read on, we'll take a look at the concepts involved and the staps to take to not only get up and running quickly but to be productive in this interesting tool.

22 Dec 2011 3:52pm GMT

CPA Site Solutions just put out this Press Release that touts CodeIgniter. They used it to create their new email marketing system.

And I quote:

"We evaluated several frameworks for PHP web application development. Many of them could have worked, but they really tried to lock you in to their way of doing things," explains Bob Rayl, Chief Technology Officer at CPA Site Solutions. "They did not offer the flexibility we need to accomplish some of the heavily proprietary functionality we bundle into our systems."

As part of the original article they also state that CI helped cut their development time.

If you have used CodeIgniter for a project that you think deserves a mention email Marcus

20 Dec 2011 1:00pm GMT

p. This area is intended for everyone new to PHP. It opens with a series of informal, entertaining tutorials written by Vikram Vaswani, founder and CEO of Melonfire. These tutorials build on a previously-published 5-part series which has now been updated and extended to embrace PHP 5, making parts of it suitable for those of you who already have worked with PHP 4 in the past.

19 Dec 2011 9:00pm GMT

A PHP framework usage survey has been created with our community in mind. Though not strictly limited to CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine developers, the questions are particularly relevant to you. The anonymous survey is very brief-just seven questions-and should take no more than five minutes or so to complete. The survey is open immediately and will remain open over the weekend.

We quickly discovered after opening the survey that Survey Monkey has a setting to enable "Other" as an option in addition to providing the "Other" box. This results in requiring you to make a valid selection in addition to filling in your own response. If you need to fill in your own response, go ahead and select an item from the list in addition to your answer for "Other", and we will remove the selected item from the results. We are unable to edit that option as the survey has already begun collecting data, and we do apologize for any inconvenience this causes.

Take the survey.

Thanks for participating!

09 Dec 2011 9:02pm GMT

What can you tell us about the team that built skyclerk.com?

Skyclerk is a product of Cloudmanic Labs, once a consulting firm, now more of a product company. Currently, we are a 5-person team: 2 designers, 2 programmers, and a content person. Our team is simply amazing. We have a love of strong design, from the UI to the code. We spend much time looking at different products on the market and have a great deal of internal debate on how we could make things better. While the resumes of the team are impressive, our real secret sauce is our deeply shared passion to always make super high quality products.

What can you tell us about the site in general? What are the goals of the site and the main audience?

Our main mission is to make small business bookkeeping simple, fast, and engaging. Skyclerk started out many years ago as an internal tool. Most bookkeeping products were just too complex, slow, and annoying to work with. In our non-skyclerk days often someone would take an entire day off of work each month just to do bookkeeping. Also, not every small business owner has a masters degree in accounting (at times it seems you need one for other solutions).

Everyday we focus on finding new ways to make bookkeeping even more straight forward and seamless. Currently we don't provide all the bells and whistles other bookkeeping packages provide, so our customers tend to be smaller companies, often no bigger than 10 people. Our customers are anyone from a web designer, to a small law firm, to pool cleaners. We have customers all over the world, the UK and Brazil being our top countries outside of the United States.

What was your major consideration in using CodeIgniter for this?

Flexibility. We played around with all the other PHP frameworks, and always felt confined to doing things by the framework's rules; very hard to expand. Some of them seemed too bloated. Before we discovered CodeIgniter we set out to write our own framework, with which Skyclerk was originally written. We were having internal debates on open sourcing our framework but the extra hard work of documenting it and adding the extra polish needed for public consumption seemed like a lot of overhead for a small company. One day we stumbled on CodeIgniter from a Google search of well documented frameworks. After looking at its guts, we realized CodeIgniter was where we were striving to be. We shortly killed our framework and have been a CodeIgniter shop ever since. So fast, so not bloated, so expandable. Perfect for what we value in a code base.

What is next on the plate for skyclerk.com? Any additional functionality you can tell us about?

At Cloudmanic we break our time up into what we call a 60/20/20 rule. We spend 60% of our time bettering our current features and product offering. This 60% comes mainly from user feedback. We have engaged users, who are always happy to tell us what they like and dislike. 20% of our time is spend building new features. Sometimes we build features from market demand and sometimes we build features we just internally really want. The last 20% is spent building new random things, for which we do not require a reason. The interest or passion of a team member is all that is needed, and all that matters. Sometimes these ideas flop. Sometimes it turns into some open source tools we release, and sometimes they become brand new products.

We have spend a great deal of time on our mobile apps (Android is released, and iPhone will be release soon). Invoicing is coming very soon, as well as some pretty cool integrations with other software providers.

Do you have any other information you'd like to share with the community? Tips from this project you'd like to share? Lessons you've learned?

Take bets. I think this goes for any sort of software development. If you have an idea of how to do something better, just go for it. You might hit a dead-end or you might discover an amazing new way of doing something. Either way, the learnings will improve your software development. In the past we just followed the conventional wisdom. Often times via little bets we find better ways to build more scalable software.

Also, as a software team we build software on a no schedule bases. We do not have timeline or due dates. We never take shortcuts. Allowing the team freedom to dedicate as much time as necessary to build the best product possible is one of the worthiest development lessons we have learned. Oddly enough we get things done pretty quickly. The stress of a deadline just clouds judgement.

Lastly, we live in an Open Source world. Read through other people's code. We have learned so much by simply checking out random code from Github and reading through it. The more tricks you have in your bag the better.

05 Dec 2011 2:37pm GMT

Since the announcement of CodeIgniter moving to GitHub three months ago at CICON2011 we've seen the community thrive. CodeIgniter quickly climbed the rankings on GitHub's Most Watched PHP Projects page all the way up to 4th place at time of writing, we've had contributions from 77 developers, merged over 100 pull requests and we still have plenty more to go.

Instead of simply continuing the 2.0.x branch CodeIgniter is now on 2.1.x which not only signifies the impact of our contributions but reflects some bigger changes that have been added since the last version:

1. Migrations - version your database schema with simple up() and down() methods.
2. PDO Database Driver - CodeIgniter now supports PDO which opens up the number of Database engines you can use significant.
3. More PHP 5 syntax - since removing support for PHP 4 we've been deleting old PHP 4 code and replacing it with much quicker PHP 5 code.

These are a few of the largest changes but 2.1 brings a huge number of other changes which are all listed in the changelog.

With the move to Git and GitHub the EllisLab Team and the Engineers can support branches and multiple version management much easier. This means that while we work on fixing bugs in the stable 2.1 branch we can work on big new features such as HMVC and the integration of Sparks, along with some great ideas we'll announce at a later date. All changes and bug fixes going into 2.1.x will be merged with 3.0 (the develop branch) as we go, so no work is being duplicated in development time. This simple means we need you to pick which branch to send your pull request to: bugs in 2.1 and new features in 3.0.

Other things waiting until the 3.0 release are the new User Guide and the change of license to OSL. These are some large changes which require time to finish up perfectly and the User Guide certainly is a work in progress. 3.0 will be a few months away so there is lots of time to get it perfect and you will all have a chance to help out on GitHub.

In the mean time we certainly suggest you upgrade. CodeIgniter 2.1 is a better, more stable, more useful version of 2.0 which should be perfectly compatible with your existing 2.0.x applications.

28 Nov 2011 3:37pm GMT

As such, we will be reviewing proposals for any new components which proposers are confident can be completed in time [...]

22 Nov 2011 4:30pm GMT

Recently, the Zend Framework community has developed a new component for cloud services: Zend_Cloud_Infrastructure. This component was provided to manage [...]

18 Nov 2011 4:38pm GMT

This showcase is with Nick Schwab the Technical Diplomat (CTO) for GetAmbassador.com a new Social Referral platform.

What can you tell us about the team that built getambassador.com?

We're a team of 3 fresh out of the TechStars New York program - two web developers (myself and Cody Christian) building the platform while Jeff Epstein hustles on the business side. Cody and I each have over 7 years of PHP experience, 3 years of CodeIgniter experience, and have been building websites for over 10 years. In addition, Jeff and I both bring experience from capitalized exits from previous internet companies to the team.

What can you tell us about the site in general? What are the goals of the site and the main audience?

Ambassador is a social referral platform to allow any company to get more users by rewarding their existing ones for referring their friends. We realized that many companies have built the same basic referral architecture for their websites and we wanted to break the chain of repetition by building a simple SaaS platform which manages the architecture at large scale. Not only do we save companies time and money with our full-scale referral platform, but we also deliver insights into the referral behavior and true value of their customers through an elegant dashboard. Ambassador is free for consumers who want to create a profile of their favorite brands to start earning rewards and we offer a variety of service plans for businesses who want to use our platform to power their referral program.

What was your major consideration in using CodeIgniter for this?

We wanted a framework with great documentation and excellent modulation through the MVC approach. Naturally, CodeIgniter was a perfect fit. Additional factors included the liveliness of the CodeIgniter community (and some of the great 3rd party contributions they've made) and the framework's support of custom libraries to allow us to easily build a version-controlled API.

What is next on the plate for getambassador.com? Any additional functionality you can tell us about?

We're building more integrations into 3rd party applications to make it as easy as possible for companies to get started using our platform and we're always building out more insights for companies so they can get a better look at the referral influence of their customers.

Do you have any other information you'd like to share with the community?

We're hiring great developers to help us build out the platform and integrate with 3rd parties. If you're a programming prodigy who likes to solve complex relational problems, we should chat.

Tips from this project you'd like to share? Lessons you've learned?

Leverage the community. There are excellent libraries contributed by some talented developers which allow you to build faster.
Always build in modules. If (and when) the product changes, you'll be thankful you did.
Routes are your friend, especially when building a product with a versioned API.
Iterate. Start with a proof of concept - a minimal viable product - and test your assumptions before building features you might not actually need.

15 Nov 2011 11:00am GMT

Every week we hear of really awesome places that CodeIgniter is being used. I want to start sharing those with the community-at-large. I will start by posting them here under a new Showcase Category with the hopes that any future revisions of CI.com will have a section for stuff like this. You guys and gals make some really cool stuff and deserve a platform to show it off.

So without further ado…

This showcase is an interview with Kyle Roseborrough about GoCart

What can you tell us about the GoCart team?

We have a pair of PHP developers who knew there was a better way to build a shopping cart. Noah (lead developer) has 6 years experience in PHP development and 4 years in CodeIgniter. Gabe has about 10 years experience in web application development. Kyle has been working in UI and management for 10 years.

What can we tell about the site in general?

GoCartdv.com was built to showcase GoCart and offer some basic information on the system.

What are the goals of the site and the main audience?

The main audience is CodeIgniter developers who are wanting a simple, scalable, CodeIgniter shopping cart. The goal is to get people involved in development to improve the cart and allow it to fully embody the goal of the project. To be easy to customize for developers and easy to use for end users/customers

What was your major consideration in using CodeIgniter for this?

CodeIgniter has great documentation and is easy to learn. We build lot of custom projects on CodeIgniter and it only made sense for us to build our cart on it. When looking for commerce solutions, we never found a suitable solution built on CodeIgniter so we decided to set out to do it on our own.

What is next on the plate for GoCart?

We really want GoCart to foster a great community of people contributing back to the roadmap and path the project will take. We want the focus to remain the same though "Easy to Customize, Easy to Use". It would be great if we could get enough people using.

Any additional functionality you can tell us about?

Well, not really. GoCart is intended to be a shopping cart, plain and simple. It does have some basic page and banner management and a whole slew of cart related features, but ultimately it's an ecommerce platform.

Do you have any other information you'd like to share with the community?

We built GoCart to be simple and scalable. As time goes on, we want the software to become easier and easier to use. We want GoCart to be scalable and to be able to work with new platforms as they come out. We feel that CodeIgniter and the CodeIgniter community is a huge benefit here. It enables developers to tie into a whole plethora of libraries, helpers and applications easily and support each other in the endeavor to make CodeIgniter better. Essentially, what's good for CodeIgniter is good for GoCart.

Tips from this project you'd like to share?

If you really want something, do it yourself. If it doesn't happen then you probably don't want it as bad as you think.

Lessons you've learned?

- Not every idea is a good one. Generally you need someone else around to discuss ideas and methods with. Collaboration is the best way to build a good application.
- No one knows what the next trend will be. Having a scalable platform that will adjust to a new set of tools and user demands is very important.

If you have a project that you would like to see in our showcase email me

05 Nov 2011 7:31pm GMT

The Zend Framework community is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Zend Framework 2.0.0beta1. Packages and installation instructions are available at:

http://packages.zendframework.com/

18 Oct 2011 7:44am GMT

We are happy to announce today that the user guide has had some significant improvements, and the first commit of these changes were just pushed today.

As many of you likely heard at CICON 2011, the Reactor team has had an internal project going on for some time to move the user guide to Sphinx. In addition to handling the tedium of generating page and document tables of contents, or maintaining internal links and references, the documentation is now easier to write, as you can simply focus on the content instead of markup and presentation. Don't forget syntax highlighting of PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in code samples. Based on ReStructured Text, it's also more human readable in a text editor than HTML is, which is likely where you spend most of your time. As an added benefit, Sphinx can output HTML, PDF, and even EPUB formats all from the same source files. We will likely be taking advantage of that at a later date.

But we didn't stop there, we also enlisted the thunderous powers of EllisLab's Chief Creative Officer, James Mathias for a style redesign. They are clean, easy to read, and beautiful.

Setting up your dev environment to work with Sphinx (if you want to render and output locally) is very easy, and takes about five minutes. For those that want to geek out, we have added a readme file to the user guide source folder so the step by step instructions are available right from GitHub.

Today marks the first commit with the new user guide to the unreleased develop branch, so you may encounter some bumps. Most notably are the code blocks, which pandoc lost our line breaks on, and some navigation issues as we experiment with different table of contents presentation and depth. We'll be cleaning these up prior to the next release (much is as simple as some line breaks and tabs), but feel free to pitch in and submit some pull requests if you see anything out of whack.

And lastly, for the first time ever, we have live nightly builds of documentation for the develop branch available at the CodeIgniter web site. Enjoy!

05 Oct 2011 7:23pm GMT

The Zend Framework team announces the immediate availability of Zend Framework's ALL ONES 1.11.11 release, the eleventh maintenance release in the 1.11 series.

1.11.11 includes around 30 bug fixes and may be downloaded from the Zend Framework site.

29 Sep 2011 7:52am GMT

The EllisLab family of sites (ExpressionEngine.com, CodeIgniter.com, MojoMotor.com, and EllisLab.com) will be down for scheduled maintenance on Thursday, September 22, 2011 beginning at approximately 10-11pm Eastern and lasting a number of hours. Access to critical resources such as the store, your product downloads, and documentation will be unaffected.

21 Sep 2011 4:17pm GMT

For those who haven't put the recurring event in their calendar, the Zend Framework Monthly Bug-hunt is here again! This Thursday, Friday and Saturday (the 22nd, 23rd and 24th of September), we'll be hosting our monthly bug hunt. For those of you unfamiliar with the event, each month, we organize the community to help reduce the number of open issues reported against the framework.

21 Sep 2011 3:07am GMT

CodeIgniter is a community driven project and accepts contributions of code and documentation from the community. These contributions are made in the form of Issues or Pull Requests on the EllisLab CodeIgniter repository on GitHub.

Issues are a quick way to point out a bug. If you find a bug or documentation error in CodeIgniter then please check a few things first:

• There is not already an open Issue
• The issue has already been fixed (check the develop branch, or look for closed Issues)
• Is it something really obvious that you fix it yourself?

Reporting issues is helpful but an even better approach is to send a Pull Request, which is done by "Forking" the main repository and committing to your own copy. This will require you to use the version control system called Git.

Guidelines

Before we look into how, here are the guidelines. If your Pull Requests fail to pass these guidelines it will be declined and you will need to re-submit when you've made the changes. This might sound a bit tough, but it is required for us to maintain quality of the code-base.

PHP Style: All code must meet the Style Guide, which is essentially the Allman indent style, underscores and readable operators. This makes certain that all code is the same format as the existing code and means it will be as readable as possible.

Documentation: If you change anything that requires a change to documentation then you will need to add it. New classes, methods, parameters, changing default values, etc are all things that will require a change to documentation. The change-log must also be updated for every change. Also PHPDoc blocks must be maintained.

Compatibility: CodeIgniter is compatible with PHP 5.1.6 so all code supplied must stick to this requirement. If PHP 5.2 or 5.3 functions or features are used then there must be a fallback for PHP 5.1.6.

Branching: CodeIgniter uses the Git-Flow branching model which requires all pull requests to be sent to the "develop" branch. This is where the next planned version will be developed. The "master" branch will always contain the latest stable version and is kept clean so a "hotfix" (e.g: an emergency security patch) can be applied to master to create a new version, without worrying about other features holding it up. For this reason all commits need to be made to "develop" and any sent to "master" will be closed automatically. If you have multiple changes to submit, please place all changes into their own branch on your fork.

One thing at a time: A pull request should only contain one change. That does not mean only one commit, but one change - however many commits it took. The reason for this is that if you change X and Y but send a pull request for both at the same time, we might really want X but disagree with Y, meaning we cannot merge the request. Using the Git-Flow branching model you can create new branches for both of these features and send two requests.

How-to Guide

There are two ways to make changes, the easy way and the hard way. Either way you will need to create a GitHub account.

Easy way

GitHub allows in-line editing of files for making simple typo changes and quick-fixes. This is not the best way as you are unable to test the code works. If you do this you could be introducing syntax errors, etc, but for a Git-phobic user this is good for a quick-fix.

Hard way

The best way to contribute is to "clone" your fork of CodeIgniter to your development area. That sounds like some jargon, but "forking" on GitHub means "making a copy of that repo to your account" and "cloning" means "copying that code to your environment so you can work on it".

1. Set up Git (Windows, Mac & Linux)
2. Go to the CodeIgniter repo
3. Fork it
4. Clone your CodeIgniter repo: git@github.com:<your-name>/CodeIgniter.git
5. Checkout the "develop" branch At this point you are ready to start making changes. Fix existing bugs on the Issue tracker after taking a look to see nobody else is working on them.
6. Commit the files
7. Push your develop branch to your fork
8. Send a pull request http://help.github.com/send-pull-requests/

The Reactor Engineers will now be alerted about the change and at least one of the team will respond. If your change fails to meet the guidelines it will be bounced, or feedback will be provided to help you improve it.

Once the Reactor Engineer handling your pull request is happy with it they will post it to the internal EllisLab discussion area to be double checked by the other Engineers and EllisLab developers. If nobody has a problem with the change then it will be merged into develop and will be part of the next release.

Keeping your fork up-to-date

Unlike systems like Subversion, Git can have multiple remotes. A remote is the name for a URL of a Git repository. By default your fork will have a remote named "origin" which points to your fork, but you can add another remote named "codeigniter" which points to git://github.com/EllisLab/CodeIgniter.git. This is a read-only remote but you can pull from this develop branch to update your own.

If you are using command-line you can do the following:

git remote add codeigniter git://github.com/EllisLab/CodeIgniter.git

git pull codeigniter develop

git push origin develop

Now your fork is up to date. This should be done regularly, or before you send a pull request at least.

[Editor's note: This article will be added to the User Guide]

06 Sep 2011 1:36pm GMT

In less than two weeks since the announcement was made at CICON that CodeIgniter was moving to GitHub, we've seen some incredible results from the change. Already CodeIgniter is the 10th most watched PHP project at GitHub (currently 758), with 42 open pull requests, 53 merged pull requests, 170 forks, and 41 individual contributors. Incredible!

Behind the scenes, the Reactor engineers and the EllisLab team are regularly conversing about potential changes, and working jointly on larger more sprawling projects like converting the userguide to Sphinx, and getting things ready for the inclusion of Sparks.

We also noticed what seemed to be a spike in activity on the #CodeIgniter Freenode IRC channel, so we've decided to make it more prominent to encourage its continued use. You'll now notice an IRC tab in the main navigation, letting you access the #CodeIgniter IRC channel right here at CodeIgniter.com.

Join in the discussions, and if you haven't already, start watching the CodeIgniter repo at GitHub, contributing, and even just commenting on people's requests or engaging in peer code review. With our community's energy, I think we might even eclipse some of the larger PHP projects at GitHub! You all are awesome, and we thank you.

31 Aug 2011 8:29pm GMT

Phil Sturgeon has settled in after last weekend's very successful CICON, and relates his take on the biggest news items: GitHub, git-flow, no more "Core" branch, Sparks, and (drum roll) the community! Read the full article on Phil's blog.

27 Aug 2011 12:43pm GMT

If you've been maintaining a Mercurial fork of the CodeIgniter repo, we've written up a how-to demonstrating migration of that repository to Git. You can always just clone anew from GitHub, but if you migrate your Hg repository, you will not lose any of your change set history when switching. Read the step-by-step instructions along with some additional resources at the EllisLab blog.

25 Aug 2011 2:27pm GMT

If you are following CICON 2011 today, then you no doubt already heard from the Reactor team: CodeIgniter is now using Git for source control, and has moved its home to GitHub. Also, CodeIgniter "Core" is not longer being publicly maintained. CodeIgniter "Reactor" is CodeIgniter, so we are dropping that suffix. In short: CodeIgniter is the framework, and Reactor is our community driven development program.

Lastly, version 2.0.3 was released today, download it here or from the release tag at GitHub.

For full details of our switch to Git, head over to the EllisLab blog.

20 Aug 2011 4:03pm GMT

One thing I often wished to have when using Git was the ability to autocomplete Git commands and branch names. As I had to learn this week from Markus Prinz' article A few of my Git tricks, tips and workflows, Git comes with an autocompletion script for the Bash shell. But to use the autocompletion, [...]

06 Apr 2011 8:36am GMT

Till recently I always used a for-loop when I had to iterate over an array in JavaScript. For example: var myArray = [1, 2, 3, 4]; for (var i = 0; i < myArray.length; i++) { console.log(myArray[i]); } However, with ECMAScript 5 the Array object itself got some methods for iteration purposes. With those methods [...]

01 Apr 2011 2:51pm GMT

From emails I receive it seems like there is a bit of confusion about what the terms 2-legged OAuth and 3-legged OAuth mean. I hope I can clear up this confusion with this article (and don't contribute more to the confusion…). In short, they describe two different usage scenarios of OAuth involving two respectively three [...]

10 Jan 2011 5:30pm GMT

There is a new bugfix release of the OpenID component available: https://github.com/cakebaker/openid-component/downloads. This release fixes a bug in the isOpenIDResponse() method. So far this method only recognized OpenID responses from a GET request. But as I had to learn, there are OpenID providers (e.g. Hyves) responding with a POST request… So, if you use the [...]

08 Dec 2010 3:53pm GMT

If you are using Vim you already know the meaning of the "j" and "k" keys: they navigate one line downwards resp. upwards. Some websites like The Big Picture adopted this functionality to provide an easy way to navigate, in the case of The Big Picture to jump from photo to photo. As I wanted [...]

04 Dec 2010 9:33am GMT

My current testing tool of choice is Cucumber. Cucumber itself integrates well with other tools. One of those tools is Webrat, which allows you to access your application without a browser and to perform actions like clicking on a link or filling out forms. It works fine with Rails 2.3.x, but not with Rails 3 [...]

19 Sep 2010 2:24pm GMT

Last week I received a mail from a user of the OpenID component in which he described that it wasn't possible to login with OpenIDs from claimID and Blogger. After some debugging I found the reason for this problem: a bug in the isOpenIDResponse() method. The method only recognized responses from providers using OpenID 2.0, [...]

19 Jul 2010 2:23pm GMT

A while ago I wrote about how you can group related constants in PHP5 by using a constants class: class MyConstants { const AA = 'value'; const BB = 'another value'; } echo MyConstants::AA; // output: value Now, while experimenting with JavaScript (or more precisely with Node.js) I got some constants in my code I [...]

14 Jul 2010 2:10pm GMT

As mentioned in the title, I released a new version of the OpenID component today. It's a maintenance release: the only change is an update of the bundled PHP OpenID library from version 2.1.2 to 2.2.2. With this change you no longer have to patch the OpenID library if you are working with PHP 5.3. [...]

19 May 2010 7:51am GMT

Those who follow me on Twitter probably know about my love-hate relationship with CSS. To ease the pain of working with CSS I switched to Compass, a stylesheet authoring framework. With Compass, you write the stylesheets in Sass (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets) instead of CSS. Sass is basically CSS without brackets and semicolons, as you can [...]

08 May 2010 1:13pm GMT

We can use immediately an experienced Cake developer for assisting us with developing a multi-lingual application that needs some Jake/Joomla (css) integration. We have continuously Cake projects and prefer to work with a team of individual developers in multiple time zones. Please show me that you are experienced, affordable and have at least 24 hours available per week (40 is better ;-).

04 Mar 2010 11:54am GMT