Dave Dash

reusability

2008-01-30T00:00:00-08:00

[tags]django, plugins, apps, projects, symfony[/tags]

A project is a collection of settings for an instance of Django, including database configuration, Django-specific options, and application-specific settings.

The Django Book, Chapter 2:

A few people have been asking for more comparisons between symfony and Django. For me it's a great way of understanding Django and python as well as symfony and PHP.

Reusability is at the core of Django, not an afterthought. The only unique part of an app is the settings and the views. Everything else is an application that can exist independently of your app. It's nice and decoupled.

This wouldn't be impossible to do in symfony. Each module could be designed from the start as a plugin. Complete with its own set of models and default templates. The configuration of a project/app could then make the web app unique.

Right now the bulk of my symfony models are tightly coupled to their apps. It's a little confusing, but there isn't a direct correlation between Django projects, Django apps and symfony Projects, apps and modules. Each kind of overlaps one another.

sfBlueprintPlugin: Train of thought development

2007-08-30T00:00:00-07:00

I've been creating some dummy projects for my presentations at SymfonyCamp and decided now would be a good time to learn using the Blueprint CSS framework. It's a bit different than YUI which I've been using heavily, but it has some potential.

Of course, instead of just downloading the framework, I made a plugin for symfony. It's not much yet, but eventually I'll throw in some helpers.

Enjoy!

[tags]css, symfony, blueprint, plugins, symfony camp, camp, yui[/tags]

Facebook Markup Language: the Dashboard and Action links

2007-07-25T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]facebook, fbml, apps, reviewsby.us, symfony, sfFacebookPlatformPlugin, plugins[/tags]

Facebook has the concept of the dashboard:

In case the documentation isn't clear, these are where the top buttons for your app go.

I created the FBMLHelper to help you write links from symfony to facebook.

The dashboard itself is easy to create:

<fb:dashboard>
</fb:dashboard>

The links are fairly simple, but if you use symfony... we like helpers...

So the FBMLHelper has an fb_action method which is similar to link_to:

<?php echo fb_action('My Dining', '@homepage') ?>

Will actually render as:

<a href="http://apps.facebook.com/reviewsbyus/">My Dining</a>

Provided the app_facebook_canvas_url is set to your canvas url (for example, our's is http://apps.facebook.com/reviewsbyus/).

This helper takes care of routing and rewriting the URL to something that will work within Facebook's canvas.

... so start writing some apps. This plugin will be developed further and I'll try to publish tutorials whenever possible.

sfZendPlugin

2007-04-10T00:00:00-07:00

[tags]Zend, Zend Search Lucene, Search, Lucene, php, symfony, zsl, plugins[/tags]

I originally intended to rewrite my Zend Search Lucene tutorial, but Peter Van Garderen covered the bulk of what's changed and I was too busy developing search functionality for lyro.com (not to mention finding inconsistencies with the Zend Search Lucene port and Lucene) to finish the tutorial. So I broke it up into smaller pieces.

I packaged Zend Framework into a symfony plugin. symfony is easily extended using plugins.

You can obtain this from subversion with the following command (from your /plugins directory):

svn export http://svn.symfony-project.com/plugins/sfZendPlugin

symfony has a Zend Framework Bridge which let's us autoload the framework by adding the following to settings.yml:

.settings:
  zend_lib_dir:   %SF_ROOT_DIR%/plugins/sfZendPlugin/lib
  autoloading_functions:
    - [sfZendFrameworkBridge, autoload]

First we define sf_zend_lib_dir to be in our plugin's lib directory. Then we autoload the bridge framework.

After setting this up, all the Zend classes will be available and auto-loaded from elsewhere in your code.