Blog about Symfony and more…

Sometimes I want to create new symfony projects to try something, or, well, sometimes even to do some actual work.

Then, I go to the Jobeet tutorial and follow the first steps. After that, since I use git, I check out this post to setup symfony as a submodule.

I have written a simple bash script with that post and a few more lines, to automatize the process. It may be useful for others, and for me to have it accesible, so I will post it here:

setupsymfony.sh:

#!/bin/bash

SYMFREPO="git://symfony-git.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/symfony-git/symfony-git"
DBUSER="root"
DBPASS=""
VENDOR_DIR="lib/vendor/symfony"

if [ -z "$DBPASS" ]; then
 echo edit setupsymfony.sh to add your mysql password on line 4: DBPASS=\"password\"
 exit
fi

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
 echo usage: $0 project name
 exit
fi

mkdir $1
cd $1

git init
git clone $SYMFREPO $VENDOR_DIR
git submodule add $SYMFREPO $VENDOR_DIR/

git submodule foreach 'git submodule init && git submodule update'

git commit -m 'Initial commit; initialized symfony-git (1.4)'

$VENDOR_DIR/data/bin/symfony generate:project $1
echo "config/databases.yml" > .gitignore
echo "cache/*" >> .gitignore
echo "log/*" >> .gitignore

./symfony project:permissions
git add .
git commit -m 'Initialized symfony project'

./symfony generate:app frontend
git add .
git commit -m 'Initialized frontend application'

mysqladmin -u$DBUSER -p$DBPASS create $1
./symfony configure:database "mysql:dbname=$1;hostname=localhost" $DBUSER $DBPASS

usage:  ./setupsymfony.sh name_of_the_new_project

remember to write your database password in the line 4 of the script.

#Edit: updated to include the changes proposed by kbsali. Thanks!

#Edit2: I have posted it in a gist.

Lately, I wanted to do a website for a non profit association in which I am involved. Since I really like symfony, I decided to do it using one of the CMS that extend symfony. Looks like there are three main choices: Apostrophe, Diem and Sympal.

I tried first Apostrophe, because I liked a lot the demo video they have in their page. The concept is awesome and it is really worth a shot. Unfortunatelly, we wanted to have a blog, and the blog plugin for apostrophe is not ready yet. I had to abandon it, although I want to use it back in the future.

Then, I asked other symfonians on Twitter (@davidcastello, @loalf & @ivandebenito are always very helpful :), and, after seeing the demo on the Diem site, I installed it and followed the tutorial A Week of Diem Ipsum.

The tutorial is just great. Well explained and illustrative, and the CMS itself suited my needs, although I was disappointed when I saw that the last lesson ends with “On the next chapter we will add comments to the blog.”, and… there is not next lesson. Anyways, I asked on IRC and they pointed me to dmCommentPlugin, which is the way to do it. #EDIT: That chapter of the tutorial is now available! :)

After following the tutorial you can notice that Diem gives what they promise:

• You don’t need to develop all those boring thinks common to lots of pages. They are already implemented, as you can expect from a CMS, but moreover everything works smoothly.
• The wysiwyg editor of layout of pages is great. It makes the task of designing the layout almost pleasing (I hate dealing with CSS).
• Extending it is quite easy, if you know symfony.

I created two new widgets for the landing page, a sort of squares with rounding boxes, a background image and some text inside… not very complicated, but it was easy, although I had to dig a bit in the code of already implemented widgets to solve some issues. I suppose that the documentation will grow and this won’t be necessary in the future, but anyways it is not a big pain. It was quite easy. After all, I was new in Diem.

I developed a system to synchronize pages and the blog with pages in Mediawiki (so that you can edit the wiki and the content is shown on the Diem website) too, and this apparently not so easy task was just smooth because, hey, you have symfony there and you can write tasks using doctrine records and so on.

So, given that I was a total newbie at Diem and I could do everything I wanted without much pain (less than expected for a new platform), and that the base (layout, editor, admin panel, search engine, etc.) worked just fine, I am very glad.

PS: Given that I found that Diem suited my needs, I didn’t try Sympal, so I cannot say anything about it. It was a matter of luck and perhaps eye candy to try Diem before Sympal, I don’t have rational arguments for this choice. I will install it in the future and play a bit with it.

This is the workflow that we are currently using for work with remote branches.

Pushing local branch to remote

git push origin my-branch:refs/heads/my-branch
git config branch.my-branch.remote origin
git config branch.my-branch.merge refs/heads/my-branch

That will create a new branch in the remote repository and the appropriate ref.

Pulling from remote to local branch

Before checking out, we need to fetch the branch, because our repo is not aware of it. Run this to understand what I mean.:

git remote show origin

So… let’s fetch and then we’ll be able to do the checkout.

git fetch
git checkout -b my-branch origin/my-branch

You can add a –track to the last command to set up upstream configuration (see the docs)

Very often, we  want javascript files to be loaded after another. For instance, you may your files containing jquery functions to be loaded after the main jquery.js file to avoid the typical error:

$ is not defined

use_javascript (and addJavascript) accepts a ‘position’ parameter to deal with this. Position can be ‘first’ or ‘last’. For instance:

<?php use_javascript('file-you-want-to-load-at-the-end.js', 'last')?>

This week we are optimizing Makoondi to make it load faster. I am using the page speed plugin by Google. One of the first advices it gives is Enable gzip compression, Compressing the following resources with gzip could reduce their transfer size by about two thirds.

I got it working pretty eadily for the .html files, just by adding this to http.conf:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css text/html text/javascript application/x-javascript application/javascript

But it was not working for .js and .css files, no wonder how many filetypes I could add to the list. It took me a while to find the solution here by Sören Kuklau, and I am so happy that I will replicate it here :) I added this chunk of code to my http.conf:

<Directory /var/www/makoondi/web/js/>
    AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .js php_value auto_prepend_file gzip-js.php php_flag zlib.output_compression On
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/makoondi/web/css/>
    AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .css php_value auto_prepend_file gzip-css.php php_flag <lib.output_compression On
</Directory>

Then in the …/web/css/ directory I put this simple php file called gzip-css.php:

<?php
       header("Content-type: text/css; charset: UTF-8");
?>

And in the …/web/css/ directory gzip-js.php:

<?php
        header("Content-type: text/javascript; charset: UTF-8");
?>