Strangebuzz...?

Well, 2 years have passed since my post: "Writing symfony plugins is great... maintaining them is better !". I followed my own advices and all my plugins where updated for symfony 1.4 which will be the last major version of the 1.x branch. Now let's see how things evolved since 2 years:

sfDB4toPropelPlugin

• User counts: 11 (+8 users since 12 apr 2009)
• Available for: sf 1.4, 1.3, 1.2
• Users feedbacks: 0
• I like and use the sfDB4toPropelPlugin !
• Want the Symfony2 bundle ? Send me an email !

I must admit I don't use this plugin any more. Because most of people are using Doctrine as it is the recommended ORM for symfony now. But it can be useful for a small project. I didn't had feedbacks about it, it just "do the job" as it should. (It's very stable because it was extensively used for 2 big 1.0 projects)

sfLightboxPlugin

• User counts: 55 (+39 users since 12 apr 2009)
• Available for: sf 1.4, 1.3, 1.2, 1.1, 1.0
• Users feedbacks: 1
• I like and use the sfLightboxPlugin !

It's probably the most useless of my plugin, but I think it is used because it is well documented, very easy to use and available for all symfony major versions.

sfTCPDFPlugin

• User counts: 93 (+84 users since 12 apr 2009)
• Available for: 1.4, 1.3, 1.2
• Users feedbacks: 4
• I like and use the sfTCPDFPlugin !

This plugin had a very nice users boost since its creation, its my most popular plugin. Therefore I suppose that it works quiet well. It allows to avoid dealing with the unfriendly TCPDF constants with a help of a multi-configurations YAML file.

sfTaskLoggerPlugin

• User counts: 8
• Available for: 1.4, 1.3, 1.2, 1.1
• Users feedbacks: 3
• I like and use the sfTaskLoggerPlugin !

Even I think this is the most useful plugin I have done, it is also the most unpopular. It may be due to the large amount of plugins already dealing with tasks, crons, jobs-queues and so on... sfDoctrineCronManagerPlugin, axCronPlugin, sfMCronPlugin, sfJobQueuePlugin, sfGearmanPlugin. I must admit I didn't tried the others as mine fits my needs and the ones of the companies I worked for until now.

sfProjectAnalyserPlugin

• User counts: 27 (+27 users since 7 jan 2011)
• Available for: 1.4, 1.3, 1.2
• Users feedbacks: 7
• I like and use the sfProjectAnalyserPlugin !

This is my last plugin (well "our" plugin as I was not the only to contribute, thanks to all the contributors !) This is probably the most interesting as people where quiet curious about it and we had quiet a lot of positive feedbacks. What is it for ?

The sfProjectAnalyserPlugin allows you to analyse your symfony project, it can raise several coding standards alerts. A YAML configuration file allows you to switch what to analyse and also allows you to parameter threshold for each alert. This plugin can be helpful in mainly two situations:

• You quickly want to check the volumetry and code quality of a symfony project your are going to maintain.
• While developing a project from scratch, as a continuous integration tool, to ensure that as the project grows, you keep on following the symfony coding standards you defined at the very beginning of your project.

Others plugins

• RIP: sfJoomla15BridgePlugin, I gave the leadership of this plugin to another developer (but there is no more activity).
• RIP: sfWorkbenchPlugin: The XML structure of the generated WB schema was quiet hard to parse and I didn't find time to finish its proof of concept. Nevertheless, I would be glad if someone could take over this plugin. It could be very useful and used by many "lazy" developers (Well like me !)

That's 208 "regular" users for all these plugins, which is quiet a good score. I think my "symfony1 plugin developer career" is now over. I hope they have been useful for some of you. Obviously I will continue to maintain theme if big bugs were discovered. But don't except major new features. And now let's publish my first Symfony2 "bundle".

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" which allows you to tell the plugins you use in yours projects. This "plugin users count" will show which are used and work, so you don't have to waste time on a plugin which 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, which 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 which 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 which 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