As long-term PhpED user I’ve always been well aware that I was not making the most of some of the more powerful features of my IDE, particularly the debugging capabilities. Well this week I finally got debugging set-up properly and as per most of my other blog posts I’m listing what I did here for future reference and just in case it helps anyone else. Continue reading
I’ve just uploaded a blank WordPress theme called Naked that I built to assist those (like myself in the past) who have a need to quickly roll-out a WordPress theme with a custom look and feel but may not necessarily have the time to start from scratch.
It is purposely very simple and basic, but I’ve put some effort into making it self explanatory and for anyone with experience of PHP/XHTML/CSS it should be an absolute doddle to use.
Here’s the default look, woo!
You can download it here, enjoy.
Francios a core member of the Symfony team recently blogged about the 20 most popular plugins of the Symfony project based upon page views.
That list is:
I find it very interesting that the ‘simple’ ones are all in the top 6 with the CMS one – which is very new – already taking up top spot.
It proves that the interest is there for off-the-shelf solutions built upon this great framework and I feel that there’s going to be lots of exciting activity in this space over the coming months. For example I’m sure I’m not the only one who is eagerly awaiting the impending release of Magento which is based upon the Zend Framework.
After recently passing the 1 year milestone I’ve decided to bite the bullet and take on a couple of extra resources at Siftware increasing the headcount to 5. The aim is to free me up to spend more time on managing this and other business interests. I don’t do this lightly as it’s a huge investment for us but the work is out there and it’s not like I’ve haven’t done this before.
We’re looking for a heavy-hitting PHP developer to effectively take over my role as mentor, architect and day-to-day resource planner plus a junior looking to get in on the ground floor.
If you’re reading this and either role sounds of interest then please send your CV with a covering note telling us why we should employ you to careers@siftware.co.uk. Also if you know of anyone that might be interested then please don’t hesitate to forward this on.
Symfony, the PHP5 framework that I’ve firmly adopted at work for any new bespoke projects went to version 1.0 RC1 this week.
Symfony is great, not just because it allows developers like me to get on and build complex, easily maintainable apps but also because the documentation is superb.
When I picked it up 5 months ago it was on version 0.6 and already had:
To build on this already great work, today the printed book was released – which I’ve ordered. They’ve also gone one better and released the whole thing available to read online under the GFDL licence. I happen to think that this is a pretty shrewd move and hope that it will cement Symfony’s place as one of the top PHP frameworks out there along with Cake and the ZF.
If you’re a web developer and have not yet jumped into bed with a particular framework – whether self-rolled or community led – then I would strongly urge you to try out the Symfony offering. It’s the dog’s danglies.
Sensio, Fabien Potencier’s company yesterday announced a great sounding job right up there in the ticks all the boxes category:
Whether you currently live in the US or in Poland, if you know symfony well enough, we’re interested. The positions are in Paris, France, and we are willing to do the necessary paperwork and look for accommodation for you. The job description is a mix between web development and project management. Prerequisites for working at Sensio’s are simple:
* You must be an experienced PHP developer (you should know what OOP, MVC, ORM, and unit testing mean and how to apply them)
* You must be able to manage a small web project (you should know a bit about XP programming, trac, svn, and scheduling)
* You must be able to handle the relationship with a client (not necessarily with a tie, but at least with a smile)
* You must have already developed an application with symfony (askeet doesn’t count – you must have made the askeet tutorial anyway)
* You must be willing to move to Paris, France (who wouldn’t?)
* You must be available full time and soon enough (this is a real job)French is not compulsory, since our teams speak English and the projects we work on come from all over the world. Salary is attractive, working conditions are nice, the team is fantastic, projects are fun. Plus, this is a unique opportunity to work in Paris.
If you’re interested, send a email to Fabien at fabien.potencier [at] symfony-project [dot] com. Interesting profiles will be contacted by phone during the week.
After 8 or so years of being a professional web developer I today finally cracked using a debugger with PHP.
I’ve been a long suffering PHPEdit user from since it was open source and into having to pay (twice) for a licence. Unfortunately I started getting very irritated by some annoying and performance degrading bugs in the newest version. So after a number of bug reports and spending too much time trying to get to the bottom of the problem I just gave up and bought Nusphere’s PHP IDE.
It wasn’t cheap but I really quickly became to like it and a month in there is no way I’d switch back.
Anyway, I’d toyed with PHPEdit’s debugger (which I’m sure does work) but the documentation is sparse to say the least and I never got it working perfectly. But today I decided to try with PHPEd (the Nuspehre one) and got nearly there on my own but had some path issues at the last hurdle.
A post on their support forum and 10 mins later I’m presented with this FAQ entry.
Obviously mine is the the most complicated one at the bottom but adding the mappings as they suggest means that I can still see documents not in the project root and merrily debug!
Kick ass.
Today I had a requirement to strip off the first 9 digits from a string from within a Smarty template. The system using Smarty is *totally* locked down so no access to plugins or using php functions as modifiers so I could not simply do $string=substr($string,9); or even {assign var=”shorterThing” value=$thing|substr:9}
In the end I used a regexp:
/^[0-9 ]{9}/
Which reads “Match from the beginning of the string digits or a space exactly 9 characters long”.
Unfortunately, Smarty uses {} as special characters so I had to further jump though hoops to get it to work by using the {capture} command.
Anyway, here’s the final code:
[php]{capture assign=foo}/^[0-9 ]{ldelim}9{rdelim}/{/capture}
{assign var=”shorterThing” value=$thing|regex_replace:$foo:”"}[/php]
Of course my match is quite specific, but it worked for what I needed.
I’ve only been living in the midlands for a few months now but have already found two promising groups: The Multi Pack and PHP West Midlands.
Multipack seems to be a bit more designery but they are organised, have a great website and put on meet-ups. It seems that some of the organisers are also involved with Geek in the park which unfortunately I can’t attend due to other commitments.
Here’s what they say about Multipack:
The Multipack is a community of multi-talented individuals from across the Midlands UK, that come together to discuss all the things web and share their knowledge, skills and talents.
PHP West Midlands is more of your standard mailing list affair but there are rumblings of upcoming meetings. Here’s the intro:
This is the home for a group in the West Midlands who discuss and assist each other in the use PHP and PHP related technologies such as MySQL, Linux, Apache, XAMPP and more.
I have not really been on a decent mailing list since Underscore which I have frequented on and off since leaving Bristol 8 years ago, but I’m hopeful about these two groups.
Related:
My Multipack Profile
Well we’ve unpacked all of our boxes (apart from all of the ones in my office it seems), put as many again in the loft and all members of family Beale are settling nicely into our new life. I’m particularly liking the ability to have breakfast, lunch and dinner with the kids especially owing to the fact that lunch is loving prepared for me by my top bird, Cathie.
I’ve also had a nice trickle of work coming in which is very encouraging seeing as I’d budgeted for none for the first 3 months and the working from home thing is going well though that’s no surprise as my first year running Exponetic (Acksys actually, but the name changed) was from the back room of our London house.
A huge milestone was passed last night when I made my Siftware website live which promotes my Web Development and Internet Consultancy services which I’ll be providing for SME’s in the surrounding towns and cities such as Bristol, Birmingham, Hereford, Worcester, Malvern and not forgetting local Upton-upon-Severn.
I’m particularly pleased with some of the great testimonials from my clients that have been coming in over the past few days since I asked very nicely for them.
A milestone indeed so now I can focus on some of the smaller tasks in my list such as trialing some of the PHP5 dev frameworks like PHP Cake plus looking at the Beta 1 of CMS Made Simple.
