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Dec/10

16

My technology setup for the next project

9 Comments · Posted by Christian in Miscellaneous

Next year I will be starting on a new project which could be awesome. The plan is to roll it out in several countries and languages and to keep it skinnable to some extend. The site itself will be editorial for the best part but with the participation of its community.

I’m not going to tell more about the project itself but I present the current technology setup I am thinking about which will very likely be reflected in next years posts. Maybe you can add some experiences and thoughts?

So what will I use?

The following is fixed already.

  • PHP
  • symfony 1.4 with doctrine 1.2
  • sfDoctrineGuardPlugin for user authentication

I am not going to jump on Symfony2 for two reasons: it will be too late for the project and with symfony 1.4 I can get quite some synergies with other in house projects.

I don’t fancy to reinvent the wheel a lot and I don’t believe in online communities as addons to editorial websites so I plan to deeply integrate the site itself with Facebook starting from Like buttons to Facebook Connect and maybe even some widgets like the FB messages as a commenting substitute. This will also give a viral effect to the site. I am thinking about sfMelodyPlugin for this.

Because there will be some usability things to work on I am going to use jQuery as a javascript library. I was thinking about using the jQuery Themeroller to make the pages skinnable but it seems an awful lot of work so I will probably settle for LESS to allow at least colour schemes to be customised.

Because most editors will have a print background and I don’t want to spend ages on cross browser compatibility I was looking for a CSS grid framework. The one I chose is BlueprintCSS as it is easy to use and follows the same thinking as print magazines when it comes to layout.

Of course I am also going to use the plugins sfImageTransformPlugin, sfImageTransformExtraPlugin, gjShortUrlPlugin and gjPositionsPlugin. I think they will fit in nicely. ;)

I hope I can follow a mash-up approach and use a lot of free public services instead of implementing them myself. If chosen wisely this will also reduce the problem of scalability. This could all be very exciting! :)

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  • http://daraff.ch Ralph Meier

    Hi Christian

    I wish you good luck and energy, sounds very interesting!

  • http://test.ical.ly Christian

    @Ralph I’m excited too! ;)

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  • http://www.robo47.net robo47

    Sounds nice, I am playing with symfony2 only on my private time a bit and work mostly ist symfony 1.4

    What will you use for LESS processign ?
    Something self-written in php ? Or Javascript-based ?
    Or:
    sfLessPhpPlugin using php as server-side-parser ?
    sfLESSPlugin using node.js as server-side-parser ?

    And if so, will you create a less-blueprint-version to be able to alter design/layout without touching the templates ?

    Because what i was missing with using css-frameworks (I mostly use blueprint myself) in CSS with LESS, was the semantic thing to be able to work with classes i assign, like “header”, “footer” “sidebar” … .
    When using css-versions and not less-versions of the framework, You always have those ugly css-classes in your templates starting with container and the span-1,span-2 … classes up to other space-classes, clear-classes and more.

    Using a css-framework written in LESS could help here a lot because you can just generate the css out of your LESS and so really quickly change a complete layout without touching the html.

  • http://test.ical.ly Christian

    @robo47 I’m not sure yet what I’ll use but probably not node.js. So far i am thinking LESS only for urls and colors.. And I’m not that unhappy with using layout classes like span-xx as at least it helps to separate layout from design.

  • Arend

    FYI I’ve made an integration of LessPHP and sfDynamics. Since you also intend to use a lot of javascript this plugin allows for easy integration with non-less php stylesheets and still allows you to package all you javascript and stylesheet resources in an easy way.

  • http://test.ical.ly Christian

    @Arend that sounds very interesting! I will definitely come back to you on this one as soon as things get real on my side. Cheers!

  • Matthias

    Hi, is this a customer project or your own one? I’m also working on a project which will be available in several countries and languages. Skinnable is also something that is on the roadmap. I’ve created a bunch of sf 1.4 plugins (enhanced user management, great translation/i18n possibilities, website and theme management). Maybe it’s time to share them.. ;-)

  • http://test.ical.ly Christian

    @Matthias its a company internal project. I would be very interested to share. Can you open source your plugins?

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