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What OpenStreetMap is and what it’s not
May 12th, 2011
The name “OpenStreetMap” suggests some sort of an open alternative to Google Maps or similar services. Its mission is often misunderstood or miscommunicated even by the very people who promote it. If one ask for cats at a pet store and is shown dogs instead, one would be disappointed, even if one likes dogs too. […]
Integrating Markdown with Symfony
April 25th, 2011
I needed to create a help section in three languages in a Symfony 1.4 application. I wanted to make the technical writer's life as easy as possible and the source files easy to read for everyone. Markdown seemed like a good solution. Because Symfony can cache static pages, Markdown will only parse each page once. I did not have to worry about performance! Here is how to quickly add Markdown to your Symfony 1.4 application.
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Symfony – subfolders for partials
February 19th, 2011
Symfony 1.2 – 1.4 expects all partials to follow this convention: templates/_partial.php What happens when you need to organize your partials in subfolder? I tried a number of “Symfunky” avenues. Feel free to skip to the solution. Avenues Explored I first try the call the include_partial helper with “subfolder/partial”, but that results in Symfony attempting […]
SVG Transparent Color in Firefox
November 17th, 2010
I had the strangest bug in Firefox when rendering SVG. I used a 3rd party library called RaphaelJS that can output both VML and SVG based on the browser. The Context To allow a user the resizing of a visual element, I created a rectangle with the color “transparent” in the lower-right corner. The transparent […]
Developer Community: Where to Start?
November 12th, 2010
I talked and listened much about the developer community in the past years. I have been actively involved in the community since 2006. The latest community panel at ZendCon 2010 inspired me to write this article. This is part 1 of a 2-part series. You want to benefit from the community So you have never […]
10 Reasons to Write Unit Tests
May 31st, 2010
It’s been bothering me for quite some time not being able to explain the people out there why they need to write unit tests. The most common responses that I got were “this is a waste of time” and “my application has no bugs”. Unfortunately, this overconfidence and cutting corners is hurting the developers (and […]
Doctrine Translation in leftJoin()
April 24th, 2010
If you use Doctrine, then you probably know how lazy loading can hurt your performance. I carefully craft every query to everything that I need in one shot, but only what I need. One thing that evaded me at first was the i18n part. Model Relationships I am pleased with the way Doctrine + symfony […]
XLIFF Parsing Error
April 23rd, 2010
Most of the Web applications that I build are multilingual. Since I use the symfony framework often, I rely on the XLIFF standard. The error I used to ask my clients to send me a Word document with the translated text. This is the format that they are most comfortable with. An error occurred recently […]
How to extract icons on OSX
April 4th, 2010
I downloaded great icons from http://iconaholic.com but could not convert them to PNG. The info dialog said that it was a Unix Executable. After reading multiple posts on the Web, I finally mashed them up into a viable solution. No additional software is necessary. Select the file or the application that has the icon you […]
ConFoo – Episode 1 (youtube)
February 22nd, 2010
Thanks to all the participating communities, I was able to produce the following ConFoo video. It talks about what to expect from the 2010 conference. I hope you have as much fun watching it as I had making it.