I rely on Firebug daily to help me debug javascript and work with css. After upgrading to Firefox 3.5, I updated Firebug to the latest beta release, Firebug 1.4 Beta.

The beta version is of course rough around the edges, and one rough spot is the fact that often when editing css properties of an element on an html page, the entire style definition would simply disappear from the console.

Fortunately, as of today, the firebug-1.5X.0a07.xpi release fixes the problem. Click the link for 1.5X0a07.xpi within Firefox to update. I haven’t found any serious problems with the alpha version yet.

As a side note, if any of you are Safari users or are just testing your sites out for safari, make sure you enable the development menu (Preferences > Advanced > Enable Develop Menu) and then you can use the command-option-i to show a Firebug-like inspector. It’s growing on me each time I use it.

Propel does not support enum column types in its schemas, since the enum type is not support across all database types. There are a few ways around this. More…

If you ever find yourself wanting to return the contents of a partial as the entire response for an action, Symfony makes it possible. Using symfony partials with ajax, you have a lot of options of how you want to arrange your templates, but here I’ll show you what has worked best for me.

Oftentimes I find myself wanting to return the contents of a partial as the entire response for an ajax request. I do this a lot when I am already using a partial in my template, and then I want to replace that section with the results of an ajax call. We already have a partial set up to display that content, so we might as well reuse it when we have to refresh that area with new content. More…

I never remember how to do this. I like doing it from the terminal better than the “Compress X Items” option in the finder, because the finder method will sometimes add hidden files like __MACOSX which I don’t like seeing floating around.

This is so simple, it’s stupid. More…

Symfony 1.1 introduced the ability to embed forms inside other forms. Symfony 1.2 enhanced this feature greatly by providing the ability to automatically save any related objects found within these nested forms (see this blog post). Another new feature introduced in 1.2. is the ability to automatically handle file uploads in forms. Basically if you have a propel object with a file field, and define this field in your form validation schema as an sfValidatorFile, symfony takes care of removing any old field, saving the new one, and updating the column in the object to reflect the new file name. Pretty sweet. (You can read more about this feature in What’s New in 1.2.)

Everything is nearly perfect, except one problem: File fields in embedded forms are *not* processed automatically. It took me a long time to track down the issue, but it was a good opportunity for me to explore some of the new sfForm framework and really get under the under to understand how it all works. More…

There are two functions I find myself using all the time. They are very useful for javascript events that read the link href attribute to determine an action’s target. More…

I was so ready to get my hands dirty with this. Like most cases where I try to install a custom extension or php library, the directions may appear easy but it never quite goes so smoothly. More…

A friend’s gmail password was either cracked or stolen somehow and his account started sending out mass messages to his contacts. The message contains the following: More…

This took me way too long to figure out. I had a series of div tags that had mousover and mouseout events attached to them using prototype. I couldn’t get these events to fire in IE6 no matter what I tried! Events worked on links, but not any other element.

First thing to check: Are you using the png filter trick?
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(enabled=true, sizingMethod=crop src='/images/white_bg.png');

If so, make sure your mouseover elements have “position:relative” or else the event won’t fire on any element inside another element with the png filter.

This post along got me on the right track.