In symfony 1 it is possible to have different layouts for an application. But they all have to be put into the directory ‘myproject/apps/frontend/templates/’. But what if you want to use a layout from another location?

Assume you make a plugin with a specific layout, it would be nice to load the layout from the plugin directory, and not to have to copy the file to the global directory.

Here is how you can achieve this:

$template = $this->getContext()->getConfiguration()->getTemplateDir('MODULE', 'LAYOUT_FILE.php');
$this->setLayout($template . '/LAYOUT_FILE');

Let’s say you have the following:

my_project/
  plugins/
    my_plugin/
      modules/
        MyUser/
          actions/
            actions.php
          templates/
            indexSuccess.php
            MyUserLayout.php

The actions.php class could be something like this:

class MyUserAction extends sfActions {

  public function preExecute() {
    $template = $this->getContext()->getConfiguration()->getTemplateDir('MyUser', 'MyUserLayout.php');

    $this->setLayout($template . '/MyUserLayout');
  }

  public function executeIndex() {

  }
}

Have fun!

So far everything went great, well not great but ok, the periferique in paris was hell this morning, and we had a 5 hour drive from brussels to paris, thx to a train accident. But… most important… we got here.

We mist the first session on i18n but the second one on admin generator gave me som gr8 ideas on layout. After that, the Microsoft crew came on to stage, and pffff.. shitty presentation… just a promotion and selling of their Azure product. And I wasn’t impressed at all!!!

now lunch, simple but ok. and we’ll see what the next hours bring…

sessions are about to start…

well well well, that was an interesting session by Mr Bachelet. I regret it that he didn’t do the session in french, it would have been better!!! a bit of an overview of all handlers and helper, just isn’t enough I guess…

Questions are answered quite good…. He knows his stuff real good! take your time to present next time.

doctrine migrations was nice. interesting and in particular the question session with a very kind host, answering all questions asked. And believe me, there were a lot of questions

On the 16-17th of February the Symfony Live 2010 conference will be held in Paris. A lot promising developers and evangelists will be speakers on this conference like:

• Fabien Potencier
• Jonathan Wage
• Dustin Whittle
• Stefan Koopmanschap
• …

My colleague and I will attend this conference and, if everything goes well, we will try to update our DevExp blog with live feedback or summarized posts on some of the most interesting sessions.

I always had a hard time finding correct documentation on the old ASP (active server pages) language and I needed it one more time in the last few days to create a script that read from an excel file.

As I believe that it might be handy for a handful of people around the world (is there actually anybody else still developing in ASP these days?), I hereby share my little piece of code with you guys.

Any suggestions or comments are always welcome.

In my example we read from an excel file that has 1 small table that has 1000 lines and columns from A until G.
The first row contains all the column names.

'initialize variables
Dim objConn, strSQL
Dim x

Set objConn = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
objConn.Open "DRIVER={Microsoft Excel Driver (*.xls)}; IMEX=1; HDR=NO; "&_
 "Excel 8.0; DBQ=" & Server.MapPath("filename.xls") & "; "
strSQL = "SELECT * FROM A1:G1000"

Response.Write("<table border=""1"">")
Response.Write("<tr>")
'write all columnNames
For x=0 To objRS.Fields.Count-1
 Response.Write("<th>" & objRS.Fields(x).Name & "</th>")
Next
Response.Write("</tr>")

Do Until objRS.EOF

' write as much columns as there are in your excel file
Response.Write("<td>" & objRS.Fields(0).Value & "</td>")
Response.Write("<td>" & objRS.Fields(1).Value & "</td>")
Response.Write("<td>" & objRS.Fields(2).Value & "</td>")
Response.Write("<td>" & objRS.Fields(3).Value & "</td>")
Response.Write("<td>" & objRS.Fields(4).Value & "</td>")
Response.Write("<td>" & objRS.Fields(5).Value & "</td>")
Response.Write("<td>" & objRS.Fields(6).Value & "</td>")

objRS.Close

Response.Write("</table>")

Set objRS=Nothing

You can never get enough interviews, at least if they are a bit interesting…
This time we got an interview with Mr Jean-Baptiste Jung, a very friendly and ambitious guy with little spare time as he mentioned in his interview.

My name is Jean-Baptiste Jung (Pronounce: Young) and I’m a 27 years old blogger, web developer and web designer from the French-speaking part of Belgium.
I started blogging in 2006 by writing a blog in French about the Python programming language. I quickly dropped this blog and created a new one, Lyxia.org to discuss a lot of nice things about the Internet: Web development, Web design, blogging, WordPress and much more. After this successful experience, I decided to create a similar blog, but in English. This is how, in June 2008, I created Cats Who Code.
I’m also an author on several popular blogs as such as WpHacks, ProBlogDesign and Smashing Magazine where I provide various tutorials, how-tos and lists, mostly about WordPress. I have released some WordPress themes as well, the most popular is called OpenBook and the most recent NYC Theme. Apart from blogging, I work as a web developer in a French company and have a lovely wife and a very cute cat.

What projects are you currently working on?
Lots! I’m making big changes to wprecipes.com with a new design and lots of new featur

es. I’m working on CatsWHoCode.com to improve the blog even more. And at last, I’m on the point to publish my first blog which is not about web dev things!

What technologies will become important in your line of work in the near future?
I don’t have any particular technologies in mind, but I wish I have more spare time so I could learn programming for new devices as such as iPhone or Android. That seems so interesting.

What do you think, is the success of your blog? What would you like to do different if you could start over?
Well, I will not call any of my blog “successful”. They’re not ignored, that’s a sure thing, but they’re far from being at the level of successful blogs as such as SixRevisions.com!
I regret lots of bad or poor articles I wrote on CatsWhoCode. If I started with better posts as such as the ones I write now. CWC will be a lot more popular now.

How did you get the knowledge you master today? Where there seminars, lessons, people, self education or other ways important to become who you are today?
I attended web dev training in France some years ago, and I have learned most of my knowledge myself. I’m so proud of that.
People should realize that if they want, they can. They don’t need a teacher or anything. You want to be a good developer? Search, Learn, Work…and you’ll be good.

Do your blogs, CatsWhoCode and lyxia.org, ask a lot of time? How do you handle that workload?
I have sold Lyxia.org 7 or 8 months ago, but yes my blogs takes lot of time. You see, it is 11PM and I’m answering your interview
I have no problem handling the workload because I like what I do. It’s not a job; it is a hobby, something I do with passion.

What environment do you work on and what applications are important to you?
I mostly work on Macs but I use Linux and Windows (Although I don’t really like it) too. My favorite editors are Vi – because you can find it everywhere – and TextMate because it is powerful and load quickly. I also enjoy Photoshop a lot, but that’s another story

If you could start over again from the moment you left high school, what would you do different?
Definitely, I’d launch Premium WordPress themes the first before Darren Hoyt and Brian Gardner. I would be quite rich by now

Do you have any special hobbies or interests?
Beside blogging and web dev related things, I love travelling, especially to New York City. I’m addicted to that city. Another thing I love are animals. I love doing all I can do to help the Animal Rights cause.

What are your plans for 2010 or the future in general?
Continue to work on my blogs, do my best and maybe, make them successful.

Quick answers, just answer in maximum 5 words when you read these words:

1. Belgium love that country.
2. Apple The best computers!
3. Twitter Follow @catswhocode
4. Cats Meow! I just love them.
5. WordPress My favorite tool to build websites.
6. Framework Use lots of them!
7. Global Warming A tragedy for humans, animals and nature.
8. Programming One of my biggest passions.
9. Internet 10 years I can’t live without!

Thx a lot Mr Jung, we wish you all the best in the future, and tons of success

Well, well, well after our first interview I guess our ball got rollin’ and we are proud to present our second interview.

This time we got in contact with Jacob Gube who is the founder and maintainer of the Six Revisions weblog having over 35K RSS readers. Let’s hope we reach the same amount one day!!!

Jacob Gube, a web developer and designer who works with PHP, .NET, Flash/ActionScript, XHTML, JavaScript/jQuery/MooTools and MySQL, is the creator and primary author of Six Revisions – a weblog the provides practical, useful information for the modern, standards-compliant web designer and web developer.

What projects are you currently working on?

I’m working on a PHP/MySQL social news site start-up that’s self-funded. No release dates yet and there’s still a lot of work to be done! Also, I’m trying to finish up a JavaScript book.

What our the projects, blogs or websites you get inspired by and why is that?

I love Digg because I believe in the concept that you should let your users dictate what should be on the site: whether it’s what site features are needed or what content to display on the front page, and even what advertisements they want to see (which Digg is doing now) — otherwise, you’re just playing a guessing game with your UI and development teams.

I love Smashing Magazine because they provide great stuff on a regular basis and their writing style is in tune with my tastes: comprehensive, easy to understand, and visually appealing.

Projects that inspire me are apps released by 37Signals – they’re simple and minimalist, something that I admire since it’s easier to load things up with 100 useless features rather than create 1 or 2 that are absolutely well-done.

How did you get the knowledge you master today? Where there seminars, lessons, people, self education or other ways important to become who you are today?

That’s a question that can’t be answered in a brief manner since it’s been a long journey to get to a point where I am now. I’ve been a web professional for over 8 years, so as you can imagine there were a lot of trials and tribulations involved in that journey.

I’m mostly self-taught and I think that most of the people that innovate in this industry are self-taught or come from a discipline that is completely remote from web development. I like to use Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman whenever I talk about this topic: both accomplished book authors, creators of A List Apart, people who’ve contributed to the progression of CSS, HTML and web standards — Meyer got a B.A. in History, minoring in English, Zeldman got a B.A. in English (from the same university I went to, which I just found out just now).

Do you consider yourself a lucky guy or did you earn all your success because of yourself?

I think a combination of both. I work very hard, but there are times where you just catch a lucky break.

What environment do you work on and what applications are important to you?

Server: Preferably a LAMP environment, but I’ve worked in WIMP’s (MSSQL) and WAMP’s (Apache/MySQL).

Desktop: Windows Vista (just upgraded from XP this year), it’ll be Windows 7 soon when I get to upgrading. Applications I use are Notepad++, Dreamweaver CS4, and Photoshop, Firebug, Web Developer Toolbar.

Web Applications: Basecamp, Gmail, Freshbooks.

What would you do if this was your last day on earth?

Spend time with my family.

If you could start over again from the moment you left high school, what would you do different?

I would not have spent that much time raiding the Molten Core and Black Wing Lair in World of Warcraft.

Do you have any special hobbies or interests?

I like building computers – it’s an expensive hobby. I also do a bit of photography.

What are your plans for 2010 or the future in general?

I don’t believe in making plans – I let things develop on its own, to grow organically. I have goals, but I’m ready to change and adapt when things precipitate a different way.

Quick answers, just answer in  max 5 words  when you read these words:

1.    PHP – include(/it/in/your/projects.php)
2.   date() – JavaScript 2 will fix it (hopefully)
3.   Barack Obama – no comment
4.   Clowd - Cloud computing with clowns
5.   Windows 7 – They finally did it right
6.   Design – art and science working together
7.   Pair programming – it works with OOP
8.   Design patterns – quantifies effective user interfaces
9.   Delicious – great source of links

Thx a lot for this interview, greetings and hear you next time!!!

Those of you who’re developing with symfony under windows will have noticed that, when running tasks in the command prompt, no colors are used. This is because the windows command prompt isn’t compatible with the color notation.
Most of you also have cygwin installed (shame on you if you didn’t :p). But even if you run the tasks through “PuttyCyg”, which is fully compatible with the color notation, you will not benefit from the colors.

Why?

The problem resides in the symfony class “sfAnsiColorFormatter” in the method “supportsColors($stream)”:

  /**
   * Returns true if the stream supports colorization.
   *
   * Colorization is disabled if not supported by the stream:
   *
   *  -  windows
   *  -  non tty consoles
   *
   * @param mixed $stream A stream
   *
   * @return Boolean true if the stream supports colorization, false otherwise
   */
  public function supportsColors($stream)
  {
    return DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR != '\\' && function_exists('posix_isatty') && @posix_isatty($stream);
  }

The method supportsColors($stream) decides whether or not colors are supported. And as you can see, one of the checks is the directory separator which in our case will always return false because we are on a windows operating system. So even if you run tasks through puttycyg the directory separator will remain the same.

Possibility 1

If you always work through the puttycyg you could simply set the method to always return true, but in a command prompt it will look like this:

Dos Command Output

Possibility 2

Detect if cygwin is used. This way when you use the dos command the output will work and when cygwin is used you’ll have the colors .

I checked the $_SERVER array to find something that could help me to distinguish the cygwin prompt with the dos prompt, and I found that the ‘PWD’ key is only available on *nix shells. And when I print the value of $_SERVER['PWD'] in the cygwin prompt it gives me “/cygdrive/f/sandbox/adlogix/branch-3.2/frontend”.

Knowing that, here is how we can change the supportsColors method:

  /**
   * Returns true if the stream supports colorization.
   *
   * Colorization is disabled if not supported by the stream:
   *
   *  -  windows
   *  -  non tty consoles
   *
   * @param mixed $stream A stream
   *
   * @return Boolean true if the stream supports colorization, false otherwise
   */
  public function supportsColors($stream)
  {
    $supported = DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR != '\\' && function_exists('posix_isatty') && @posix_isatty($stream);

    return $supported ? true : !is_bool(strpos(@$_SERVER['PWD'], "/cygdrive"));
  }

What I did, is still using the check symfony used, but when it returns false I do a second check to see if the $_SERVER['PWD'] exists and that it contains the String “/cygdrive”.

Now when I run the taks through cygwin I get the colors and when I run it in dos it displays correctly.

PuttyCyg versus Dos

I only tested it on my machine, so if you have troubles or a better way to do it, please let me know .

Update: This is only tested with symfony 1.2 and as from sf 1.3 there will be an option –color to force the colors.

Update: For some reason it does not work in the cygwin bash shell. When I set the message manually (echo -e “\033[31mHello World\033[0m”) in the command the colors appear, but through symfony not. I suspect that the cygwin bash shell miss interprets the returns of php, but I have no idea why it does work on puttyCyg (which only launches the cygwin shell) … probably some startup configuration of the bash ?!

A few weeks ago I thought it might be cool to get some interesting guys, which are occupied with projects in PHP, interviewed. And guess what, we got on contact with Mr. Stefan Koopmanschap and he was kind enough to answer all our questions.

Stefan Koopmanschap (‘left’) is a PHP developer, consultant and trainer with an eye for best practices. He works at Unet as (symfony) developer and development team leader. He is a community person and is active in the european PHP community as secretary of the phpBenelux Usergroup as well as in the Symfony community by advocating symfony and as the Community Manager.

Stefan has a wide history in Open Source, having been Support Team Leader for phpBB, documentation translator for Zend Framework and community manager, plugin developer and maintainer plus various other things for symfony.

Stefan is also a best practices advocate. He prefers easy and useful explanations of best practices over the academic and theoretical stuff found in most literature.

Hope you enjoy this interview!

Hello Stefan, first of all, thx for taking the time to answer all our questions.

Can you tell us what projects you are currently working on?

At work I am involved in a big project to build an application that will handle all the administration, provisioning and handling of user accounts etc. for the whole VOiP and connectivity of the services we offer. Aside from that, my main projects are being the Community Manager for symfony and also preparing some new talks for the upcoming conferences.

What technologies will become important in your line of work in the
near future?

Obviously, a big part of my life is currently being ruled by Symfony. It is the framework we use at my work, and because of my involvement in the project it also rules a big part of my private time. Also, other frameworks (such as Zend Framework) take a part of my life for projects I’m working on. For one of my personal development projects I’m also looking into jobqueue/message servers such as Dropr and Gearman. And of course I’m always reading into new technologies to know what they can do, so I can apply that knowledge at a later date.

How did you get the knowledge you master today? Where there seminars, lessons, people, self education or other ways important to become who you are today?

I have no Computer Science background, most of my current knowledge is self-taught or I picked up through experience over the years. Sometimes this is a good thing but often this has been a problem since over the years I have reinvented the wheel. Reading about design patterns for instance I often found out the things I “invented” were really thought about way before me by much smarter people who also considered many more things that I had considered. But by reading about many of these topics and best practices, I’ve picked up quite a bit of knowledge over the years. Combine that with the variation of projects I’ve been involved in and you get the knowledge and experience I’ve picked up.

Do you consider yourself a lucky guy or did you earn all your success because of yourself?

A bit of both. I’ve obviously done a lot of work to get to the point where I am right now, yet I also consider myself a lucky guy. The amount of conferences I get accepted to speaking at these days allows me to travel around the world and meet the brightest minds of the PHP community. I’ve gotten a lot of help, pointers, code reviews etc by people from the community that helped me improve myself. Many of these I did not ask for, yet I’ve found it very helpful.

What environment do you work on and what applications are important to you?

My personal preference is Apple computers with OSX. That environment allows me to work in the most efficient way. A good second choice, and the one I currently use at work, is an Ubuntu linux environment running KDE. The applications I run to help me in my work are an IDE (Zend Studio is my personal favorite), a MySQL frontend (phpMyAdmin is what I usually use), a webserver (Apache) with PHP installed with Xdebug. The main framework of choice would be symfony, with the help of additional components from Zend Framework, PEAR and ezComponents.

If you could start over again from the moment you left high school,  what would you do different?

I would do at least part-time study computer sciences to give me a better theoretical base on the development concepts I work with on a daily basis. But the thing that helps me most is the experience I built up over the years, so aside from that; I would not really do many things in a different way.

Do you have any special hobbies or interests?

Aside from PHP and Open Source, I like listening to music and read books.

What are your plans for 2010 or the future in general?

I want to keep promoting best practices, and hope to improve the general level of knowledge in the PHP community.

Quick answers, just answer in  max 5 words  when you read these words:
1.      IE – the bane of my existence
2.      Apple - the ultimate operating system
3.      Twitter – great communication and network channel
4.      Face book – interesting platform
5.      Analyze – important phase of any project
6.      Layout – I’m more a back end guy
7.      Religion – The root of all evil
8.      Programming - Fantastic source of joy
9.      Internet – Greatest invention ever

I’m glad to announce that the Adlogix team has been expanded with the addition of the fresh member ‘Dimitri Del Marmol’.

You must be wondering why I am telling you this:
Well actually, he doesn’t know it yet, but in the near future he will be writing on this blog too, sharing his experience and knowledge with u guys.

Anyhow, in the meantime I read a most interesting study about the connectivity for almost every country in the world.
The study is done by Professor Leonard Waverman, London Business School, and economic consulting firm LECG so this is a reliable source.

Belgium’s low 3G penetration amongst consumers is accompanied by a below average rate of broadband penetration.  Broadband speeds and infrastructure also lag behind many of their European counterparts, as does internet usage in general.  This is in contrast to high levels of consumer spending on software.

What universities and companies in Belgium say for years, has now again been confirmed by this study.
Let’s hope that for all the effort and investments companies and consumers do each day, government and network distributors now start acting more professional and leave super profits out of their strategy.
If we want to keep up with the big players in Europe, this has to be done in the near future.

The country is at best a middling performer in terms of production of science and engineering degrees, at both the first degree and doctoral levels. However, the share of ICT investment in total investment appears to be higher in Belgium than in most of the rest of Europe, excluding the UK and the Nordic region.

I guess the Belgian government has no choice and has to act right now as we are a nation with knowledge as only export product.
We are an average country, but we need to be outstanding in this field as we are with Robert Cailliau one of the pioneers of the internet.

Let’s hope that important investments are done, and our tax money doesn’t end up in the wrong hands, whoever they might belong to…

If you want to see how your country is scoring you can take a look at the study here

Hello everybody, I’m back with another version of basic tips and tricks.

After having a talk with a client, about the basic on css, I thought it might be good to have an easy introduction.

So let’s give it a try. We’ll talk about:

• Why would you use css?
• How to insert css in your html file
• How css is written
• Css on objects, classes and unique objects
• Basic css properties and there values
• The pseudo class
• Where to find good information on css

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation (that is, the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language.

CSS is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation, including elements such as the colors, fonts, and layout.

Why would you use css?

Whenever you create an html page without css, you will probably insert layout into it. But every object will have to get it’s layout specifications and that could be a hard time, especially if you have a lot of objects that need the same layout.
You don’t know any examples of objects with the same layout?

• A menu with 4 or 5 buttons.
• Buttons
• A list
• Different headings and titles
• Paragraphs
• …

As you can see, I don’t need to think very hard to get different objects on which the same layout can be applied.

I guess you see my point why you could use the same css code over and over again, instead of rewriting it for each object in your page.
And I’m not even talking about different pages or a whole website…

How to insert css in your html file

CSS is a file containing code you and that puts a layout on specific objects in your html file.

That code can be written in a html file within these tags

<STYLE type=text/css>                 </STYLE>

Or in a css file that is included within the <head></head> tags.

Whatever css code you write in there will be applied to the code within that page.

If you are creating a website or more than one page, it might be more sufficient to use an include so you can reuse the same code over and over again.

In my opinion the only times you can or should use the <style> tags without an include is if you are sure you will never create another page with the same layout or for testing.

Just for readability alone, it might be better to separate it from your original html file and include it.

How css is written

The coding is quite simple, the only difficult thing to learn is: what properties are there? And on which object are they possible?

Css is always written in this way:

selector [, selector2, ...]:pseudo-class { property: value; }
/* comment*/

This means:

Selector
Is the object you are trying to set the layout for.  It’s possible to put more than one selector by separating them with a comma.
Ex: paragraphs, header, etc…

Pseudo class
The pseudo class is a bit tricky and I will talk about that at the end of my tutorial.
Ex: hover, link, visited, etc…

Property
This is the property you want to set for a specific selector.
Ex: background-color, font-size, etc…

Value
This is the value you set for the property.
Ex: 1px, #f1f1f1, none, etc…

Comment
Comment is written between /* */ tags and can be 1 or more lines in length.

Css on objects, classes and unique objects

The selector is actually more then only an id and can be defined in various ways. I guess the best way to show this is by using some examples.
This will set all paragraphs in your page with the background color red.

p { background-color: red;}
<p>blabla</p>

This will set all paragraphs with the class nature with a background green.

p.nature { background-color: green; }
<p class="nature">blabla</p>

This will put a background color green on every paragraph and a brow background color on every font with class tree within the nature paragraph.

p.nature { background-color: green; }
p.nature font.tree { background: brown; }
<p class="nature"> blabla <font class="tree"> more bla </font>
</p>

If you are willing to put a layout on 1 specific object you can do that by using the #. In this case, the paragraph sky will get a blue background.

#sky { background-color: blue}
<p id="sky">blabla</p>

This part is very important because you can save tons of time and code by using classes and ids.

Basic css properties and there values

There are quite a few different properties and not all properties can be used on any object.

It’s not very complex, but with some try and error you’ll find your way quite fast in the exciting world of properties.

I’ll give some examples first from simple to a bit more difficult and there possible values.

background-color: #cccccc;
/* #cccccc is a grey color and can also be replaced by the string 'grey' */

margin: 5px;
/* this will put a margin of 5 pixels round the element */

font-size: normal;
/* The font size can also be replaced with number of px,em or % */

background: #FFFFFF url(image.jpg) repeat-x scroll left top;
/* As you can see it is also possible to add more than 1 value to some properties. */

#FFFFFF:          /* Is the default color the background has */
url(image.jpg)    /* is the image that will be displayed on the background*/
repeat-x          /*  is the way it will be repeated in. x is horizontal, y is vertical*/
scroll            /* sets if the image will be fixed or scroll with the rest of the page*/
left top          /* is where the background starts*/

/* Those are the more complex properties but can easily split up into different css properties if it's too complex.*/
background-color:  #FFFFFF;
background-image:  url(image.jpg);
background-repeat:  repeat-x;
background-attachment: scroll;
background-position: top left;

More properties are possible and you can find them other websites that I got lined up in the last part: ‘where to find good information on css’

<strong>The pseudo class</strong>

These are used to add special effects to the object they are put on.

In this example you will add different text colors when the link is visited, hovered or active

a:link {color:#FF0000}     /* unvisited link */
a:visited {color:#00FF00}  /* visited link */
a:hover {color:#FF00FF}    /* mouse over link */
a:active {color:#0000FF}   /* selected link */

Other pseudo-classes are possible like: first-child, focus, lang, etc…

Where to find good information on css

General information
Test your css
Official w3c website

Off course this doesn’t cover the whole story as this is only a basic guide.

I just hope you have some advantage from reading this.

C u next time. K.