Strangebuzz...?

This new release for symfony 1.2 is quiet interesting as it introduces a new custom configuration handler witch allows you to manage all the TCPDF constants through YAML files and you can also manage multiple configurations. If you are using the plugin don't forget to use the "I USE AND LIKE THIS PLUGIN" on the symfony plugin website.

Changelog:

• Corrected config loader
• Converted README to Markdown syntax
• Added a method to get the final TCPDF configuration
• New plugin configuration handler that allows you to use multiple configugurations for different actions and pdf
• Reorganized svn structure of the plugin, created 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 branch
• New version for symfony 1.2

Wow, that's quiet a long time i didn't blogged !! Let see if i can write something interesting ! As you have probably noticed, the symfony plugin count has recently reached the 500. This is really huge ! To celebrate this, Fabien has added an interesting functionality "I use this plugin" witch allows you to tell the plugins you use in yours projects. This "plugin users count" will show witch are used and work, so you don't have to waste time on a plugin witch does not work at all... Like the sfNadaPlugin... Moreover i think there will be another good side effect of this new functionality, is to encourage the plugins authors to update their plugin more frequently or to convert them for the different major versions of symfony. That's what i did the last week.

sfDB4toPropelPlugin

sDB4toPropelPlugin is a plugin that adds to symfony a new task: propel:db4-to-propel that allows you to convert a DB4 schema (a DBDesigner4 schema) into a valid Propel schema.yml file, with this plugin you can just forget the boring work of building your schema.yml by hand.
This is probably the most interesting of my plugins and i am quiet surprised there is only 3 guys who use it (including me). The last interesting functionality that was added with the 1.0.3 version is that you can declare tables as "external", that means that inside your DB4 schema you can make links to plugins tables, like sf_guard_user. This is very practical, i used it since more than 2 years (the 1.0 and 1.1 versions were never published) so that why i am quiet surprised this plugin doesn't have more success... Perhaps it just get lost among the 500 others. If you use and like this plugin and want to help me in giving it more visibility on the symfony website, click on the following link

• Current number of users: 3
• Available for symfony 1.1, 1.2
• I like and use the sfDB4toPropelPlugin !! (you must be logged before on the symfony

website)

• Main tutorial
• Alternative tutorial for Jobeet day 3 using the sfDB4toPropelPlugin

I will start soon the development of the worthy successor of this plugin, the sfWorkbenchPlugin, any help will be welcome ! This time i'd like to make the plugin Propel and Doctrine friendly, witch would be very interesting for all symfony users.

sfLightboxPlugin

sfLightboxPlugin is a symfony plugin that provides an easy to use wrapper for the Lightbox2 javascript library.

• Available for symfony 1.0, 1.1, 1.2
• Current number of users: 16
• I like and use the sfLightboxPlugin !
• Check the online demo

sfTCPDFPlugin

The sfTCPDFPlugin provides abstraction for the TCPDF library. The main interest of this FPDF "fork" resides in the fact that it handles any UTF8 strings witch the native encoding format used by symfony.

I have just updated this plugin, this new version for symfony 1.2 introduces a new interesting functionality , it's a handy config handler to manage several TCPDF configurations with a YAML file, so you don't have to set the TCPDF constants. So this version is far more practical that the old one.

• Available for symfony 1.0, 1.2
• Current number of users: 9
• I like and use the sfTCPDFPlugin !

sfJoomlaBridgePlugin

This was an experimental plugin, but i shamefully abandoned it... But there's a reason; it's because this old plugin was for symfony 1.0 and the old Joomla 1.0 version. Now there is a new plugin the sfJoomla15BridgePlugin for symfony 1.2 and Joomla 1.5.x witch is based on my previous code, so i have joined the dev team of this plugin. Even if have abandoned the plugin i have updated its description to invite the users not to use this one but the new one, so they don't waste their time on it. (i have received several mails about it from users who didn't saw the new 1.5 plugin... :x)

• Available for symfony 1.2
• Current number of users: 2
• I like and use the sfJoomla15BridgePlugin !

sfMyNextSymfonyPlugin

I already have several ideas for my next plugins. One that was never published and one about tests... But this will be part of another post. I wish i could find some time to post a little more frequently.

• You can find all my plugins here

See you. symfoniquement votre. ++ COil

Hi symfonians !

Well, i didn't post very often during these last months. So let's try to write something interesting. In this post i will show you an alternative way to build your database with symfony, propel and the DB4 tool. This tutorial is not really an "alternative" to the official tutorial. Let's say that we will just see another way to build our database, i won't be as exhaustive as Fabien did in the Jobeet Day 3 tutorial, therefore, for all details please refer to the official Jobeet tutorial.

Pre-requisites:

• Having done at least day 1 and 2 of the Jobeet tutorial. (or you already know symfony, in this case you will need a fresh symfony 1.2 project)
• Not being too angry with Propel

What you will learn:

• Using the sfDB4toPropelPlugin to build your schema.yml without writing a single line of this file.

What you will NOT learn:

• How wonderful symfony is. For this, read the official Jobeet tutorial of Fabien.

So let's go... We will start at this part of the Jobeet 3 tutorial.

1 - Plugin installation

First we will install the sfDB4toPropel plugin, i did not released any package for the symfony 1.2 version yet, so we will install it via SVN. (edit: i've just released the 1.0.2 version for sf 1.2.0)

   $ cd plugins
   $ mkdir sfDB4toPropelPlugin
   $ cd sfDB4toPropelPlugin
   $ svn co http://svn.symfony-project.com/plugins/sfDB4toPropelPlugin/branches/1.2

Be careful not to check out the root of the plugin but the branch related to the symfony version you want to use, actually 1.1 or 1.2)

(PS: You can also set an svn external to the plugin if your project already uses a svn repository)

...

» Lire la suite / read all «

[En] Tutorial content:

• Creating a plugin with a custom admin generator theme
• Extending the sfActions class
• Extending the sfPropelAdminGenerator class

Here is little contribution for the symfony code sprint, a symfony tutorial about the admin generator. Do you know about it ? I think it's one of my favourite symfony tool, i have developed several applications with symfony and for 75% of them i have made a custom admin generator theme. And as said in the symfony documentation, the admin generator is very very very powerful.
In this tutorial we will see a concrete example on how to extend it to provide a useful new feature. Witch feature ? Well it was one of the things a customer asked me, "I want to be able to delete several rows at a time with check boxes" ... Ahhhhh indeed, it's not a native feature of the admin generator. So.... let's do it...

::: Pre-requisite :::

Well i will not explain here how to install symfony as there are lots of tutorials about this on the symfony website and in the wiki. So i will assume you have a clean symfony installation so you can type the symfony command in cli. I used the 1.0.13 version for this tutorial.

::: Creating and setting a new project :::

:: Creating the new project ::

First we will create the new project that we will call tutorial, create a new folder tutorial and launch the init-project task into it.

symfony init-project tutorial

Now let's create the backend application:

symfony init-app backend

As it is always better to have a submain for our application add the following in you apache httpd.conf file and change it with your own path

## COil symfony tutorial n°1 : Extending the admin generator ##

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName dev.tutorial.com
  DocumentRoot "C:\wamp\www\tutorial\web"
  DirectoryIndex index.php
  Alias /sf "c:\wamp\bin\php\php5.2.5\PEAR\data\symfony\web\sf"
  
  <Directory "C:\wamp\www\tutorial\web">
    AllowOverride All
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Add the sub-domain in you hosts file:

127.0.0.1 dev.tutorial.com

Ok, at this point we should have our "Project created!" page. So Let's try to browse http://dev.tutorial.com/backend_dev.php

:: The database ::

Create a local database, let's call it tutorial again. (same as the project name)
Modify the database settings in the config/database.yml and config/propel.ini file, your database.yml file should look like this:

all:
  propel:
    class:          sfPropelDatabase
    param:
      dsn:          mysql://root@localhost/tutorial

Now we need a schema, let's take the one of Askeet

• Download the http://svn.askeet.com/trunk/config/schema.xml file and copy it to your /config folder
• Download the http://svn.askeet.com/trunk/data/fixtures/test_data.yml file and copy it to your /datas/fixtures folder

Ok now let's try to build the database:

symfony.bat propel-build-all-load backend

Oops, it seems there are some errors. As we are quite lazy just delete the password columns and the QuestionTag section of the /datas/fixtures/test_data.yml file.
Let's try again to run the last command. If your are successful you should now have some tables and data in your tutorial database. If not, you probably missed something. At this point we have a valid application with a database, some tables and fixtures. Settings are ok, so can go to the next step.

...

» Lire la suite / read all «

[En] Here is a little tip Fabien gave me. I am actually developing a plugin witch has quiet a lot of routes (about 40). Normally you can add the routes with the prependRoute function, like does the sfGuardplugin.

<?php
if (sfConfig::get('app_sf_guard_plugin_routes_register', true) && in_array('sfGuardAuth', sfConfig::get('sf_enabled_modules', array())))
{
  $r = sfRouting::getInstance();
 	
  // preprend our routes
  $r->prependRoute('sf_guard_signin', '/login', array('module' => 'sfGuardAuth', 'action' => 'signin'));
  $r->prependRoute('sf_guard_signout', '/logout', array('module' => 'sfGuardAuth', 'action' => 'signout'));
  $r->prependRoute('sf_guard_password', '/request_password', array('module' => 'sfGuardAuth', 'action' => 'password'));
}
?>

But for each prependRoute call an array_merge is done on all existing routes.

<?php
  /**
   * Adds a new route at the beginning of the current list of routes.
   *
   * @see connect
   */
  public function prependRoute($name, $route, $default = array(), $requirements = array())
  {
    $routes = $this->routes;
    $this->routes = array();
    $newroutes = $this->connect($name, $route, $default, $requirements);
    $this->routes = array_merge($newroutes, $routes);
 
    return $this->routes;
  }
?>

So the tip here is to save all routes, clear them, add the routes of the plugin and then append the saved routes. Witch can be done like this:

<?php
  // Save and clear all routes
  $r = sfRouting::getInstance();
  $routes = $r->getRoutes();
  $r->clearRoutes();
  
  // Plugin home
  $r->connect('plugin_home', '/my_super_plugin/homepage', array(
    'module' => 'my_plugin_module', 
    'action' => 'my_plugin_action',
    'additional_parameter'   => 1
    ));
 
  // Another route
  $r->connect('plugin_home', '/my_super_plugin/section1', array(
    'module' => 'my_plugin_module', 
    'action' => 'my_plugin_action_section1',
    'additional_parameter'   => 2
    ));
 
  // ... other routes
 
  // Then merge new routes with the saved one
  $r->setRoutes($r->getRoutes() + $routes);
?>

That's it. Of course it is always better to have all routes of the application in the routing.yml but in my case it was not possible.

[En] New version with the last version of lightbox (2.03.3) + new helpers. You can check the demo here on my blog.

• Updated lightbox library to v2.03.3
• 3 new helpers (light_image_text, light_slide_image, light_slide_text)
• New parameter for images slideshows to allow to display images as a html list (li..)
• Slideshow navigation with the keyboard (left, right, ESC)

Thanks for your feedback ! Enjoy.

[Fr] Nouvelle version incluant la dernière version de lightbox (2.03.3) et quelques nouveaux helpers. Vous pouvez visualiser la demo ici sur mon blog.

• Mise à jour de la librairie lightbox pour la version v2.03.3
• 3 nouveaux helpers (light_image_text, light_slide_image, light_slide_text)
• Nouveau paramètre pour les slideshows pour afficher les images comme une liste html (li..)
• Navigation dans le slideshow à l'aide du clavier (gauche, droite, ESC)

Merci pour votre feedback ! Enjoy.

[EN] Translation coming soon (edit 19/07: too lazy to do the translation)

[FR] Pas mal de mouvements ces derniers temps dans la section, on compte pas moins de 80 plugins désormais et on se rapproche de la barre fatidique des 100, c'est vraiment excellent pour le framework et lui donne une richesse certaine. On y trouve vraiment de tout, de la série de plugin sur propel qui permettent d'ajouter à cet ORM des fonctionnalités comme l'audit d'objet, la gestion d'arbre... aux plugins plus farfelus qui permettent de gérer des smileys ou qui permettent l'intégration de librairies javascript externes, ou encore qui permettent de s'interfacer avec d'autres applications PHP (sfGallery2Plugin...) Le mieux étant encore d'aller sur le wiki pour dénicher ceux qui pourront vous être utiles... Quant à mes plugins, ils se portent plutôt bien !

• sfLightboxPlugin en est à la version 1.0.5, la prochaine publication 1.1.0 sera faite par Demental et incluera donc comme le numéro de version le laisse entendre, de nouvelles fonctionnalités. Stay tuned !

• sfTCPDFPlugin à été mis à jour par fred, qui a corrigé les bugs, rendu le plugin customisable, corrigé et mis à jour l'exemple complet de la librairie TCPDF. C'est vraiment cool de voir son travail repris, amélioré et publié par quelqu'un d'autre. Mais c'est le principe même de l'open source n'est-ce pas ?

• J'avais aussi travaillé sur le plugin sfPrototypeWindowPlugin dont j'ai envoyé le code à Dustin Whittle de Yahoo!, qui a pu reprendre le code, le nettoyer et publier une nouvelle version du plugin 1.0.3. Encore ici c'est plutôt sympa de pouvoir travailler en binôme, c'est surtout beaucoup plus motivant.

• sfJoomlaPlugin lui au contraire est en train de tomber aux oubliettes... Quelques personnes s'y étaient intéressé mais depuis plus grand chose, il est vrai que d'interfacer un framework et un CMS aussi "fouilli" ( ) que Joomla reste une idée assez marginale... Enfin il a le mérite d'exister, si ça peut/a pu servir à quelqu'un...

[En] Yet another new version released by Demental
[Fr] Encore une nouvelle version publiée par Demental

Added the ability to call initmodalbox several times. Corrected wrong paths in config.php

• Symfony wiki

[En] A little snippet to display the source code of the current main template displayed in a hidden div, the template (here it is a test of the sfGeshi plugin) (1)
[Edit 20/05/07] You can find a demo here (on the demo of the sfJoomlaBridge)

[Fr] Un petit snippet qui permet d'afficher le code source du template courant utilisé dans un div caché. Le template (ici je faisais un test du plugin sfGeshi)
[Edit 20/05/07] Vous pouvez trouver une demo ici (sur la demo de mon plugin sfJoomlaBridge)

<h1>sfGeshiPlugin</h1>
 
<div id="demo">
    <?php $highlighter = new sfGeshi(file_get_contents(myTools::getTemplatePath()), 'php'); ?>
    <?php echo $highlighter->parse_code(); ?>
</div>
 
<?php include_partial('global/view_source_link'); ?>

[En] The view source link template (_view_source_link.php)
[Fr] Ici le code du template permettant d'afficher le lien pour visualiser le code source

<div id="source-content">
    <hr/>
    <?php $highlighter = new sfGeshi(file_get_contents(myTools::getTemplatePath()), 'php'); ?>
    <p>
    <?php echo link_to_function(
      '&raquo; Show source code of this template',
      visual_effect('SlideDown', 'source')
    ); ?>
    </p>
     
    <div id="source" style="display:none">
        <?php echo $highlighter->parse_code(); ?>
        <p>
        <?php echo link_to_function(
          '&raquo; Close source code',
          visual_effect('SlideUp', 'source')
        ); ?>
        </p>
    </div>
</div>

[En] And the function to get the physical path of the template :
[Fr] Et la fonction permettant de récupérer le chemin physique du template principal en cours :

<?php
    public static function getTemplatePath()
    {
        $context = sfContext::getInstance();
        $module   = $context->getModuleDirectory();
        $template = $context->getCurrentViewInstance()->getTemplate();
        return $module. DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR. 'templates'. DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR. $template;
    }
?>

[En] This version was released by Demental, it includes some improvments and bug corrections. As usual you can find all instructions on the Symfony wiki.

[Fr] Cette version a été publié par Demental, elle inclue quelques améliorations et corrections de bugs. Comme d'habitude vous pouvez trouver toutes les instructions sur le wiki Symfony.