This is an old trick, but I still find it useful and will post it here in case it will help other symfony developers out there. If you are using the prototype.js library for your ajax requests, the Ajax.Request (and similar) utility methods will automatically evaluate the server’s response as javascript if the response has the ‘text/javascript’ content-type header. More…

This is a great tutorial on SVN and it also includes a Intel disk image of SVN 1.6.1 which makes installing a breeze.

Subversion With Mac OS X Tutorial.

Symfony has a really powerful cache mechanism, but if you turn it on and don’t configure it, it will cache one file for *every possible url*, and in the case of a dynamic site with thousands of pages, this grows to many gigabytes very fast. This is especially a problem if you have a dynamic search feature, and you have search-friendly URLS where you convert query parameters to /a/friendly/path/like/this. The number of unique paths that generate content on your site is literally infinite, since the URL can include anything the user types in the search box. More…

This came in handy today when I copied a directory from another project and didn’t recognize that it was under version control in that project. Needless to say, my current project got very confused during an svn commit when it encountered this copied directory. To reconcile the situation, I had to recursively delete all of the .svn directories from the copied directory, and then check it in as a fresh copy to the new project. More…

I always have to look up the documentation on how to merge a whole SVN branch to another. Today there were bug fixes to trunk of my project that I wanted to port into my branch. I expected this to be easy since I hadn’t made many changes to my branch, and no changes to the same files that were modified in the trunk. More…

This blog post by Fabien Potencier describes how to use symfony 1.2 to create link between your applications within a symfony project. This has been difficult in the past because applications within a symfony project shared only model classes and basic project configuration, but routing was handled by unique application-based configuration. More…

There is a post hidden within the symfony documentation that discusses how to upload a file using the new forms framework within symfony 1.2. If you are curious about the best way to handle file uploads, it’s worth reading this What’s New in Symfony 1.2 post first, and then come back here for a quick summary of how this works.

Let’s say you would like to allow users to upload PDF files to your site. You store data related to these file uploads in an “article” table in your database. This table has a column named “file” that stores the file name of the uploaded pdf.

The symfony forms framework will generate the basic (and not so basic) code to get you started. If you haven’t yet generated your form classes yet, you can do so with the command:

More…

As much as I love the command line for mysql, sometimes it’s nice to have a GUI to see your tables and columns visually or to do a data dump into CSV. On OS X I’ve always used CocoaMySQL, although it became apparent a long time ago that it was no longer under development. My brother recently told me about Sequel Pro, a “MySQL database management app for Mac OS X 10.5.” You can download it here. So far it’s been working great. It truly does feel like CocoaMySQL with a Leopard interface.

There is something gratifying about starting a new project. You get to start fresh and it may be the only time during the project lifespan where everything is perfect.

Over time I’ve learned a few tricks that personally make my project environment a pleasure to work with. More…

When our design team is done with an html / css design, they upload it to a webserver for the client to review. Once it’s been approved, it’s time for the developers to download the static site and start integrating it into the php application. To pull down the site files, FTP does the job just fine, but invariably there will be changes made to the template even after it’s been approved. Or, perhaps the developers want to start on a few pages that have been finished before every page has been coded into html. A nice way to pull down only the latest files changed by your designers, making sure to get any related images or css files, is by using rsync.

Here is what works for us:

rsync -avcn -e 'ssh -p [ssh port number]' [user]@[your remote domain]:/home/[user]/[your remote template path]/ [your local template path]

This will do a dry-run, meaning it won’t actually copy any files, but it will show you what it would have done. When you are ready to go for it, remove the “n” from “-avcn”, and you’ll automatically pull down any files that have been modified on the remote server.