I am consulting a lot of web projects at work as well as privately and one of the common questions is the one for which technology to use.

The technology of my choice has for the past four years been PHP and symfony 1.4 with doctrine but recently I have started to get in touch with Symfony2.

So a new questions pops up every now and then: shall we use symfony or Symfony?

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admin generator · symfony · Symfony2

For quite some time now I keep blogging about page composition in symfony. Even when I blogged about LooseCoupling I was actully talking about a by-product of gjPositionsPlugin.

Today I am happy to announce that this plugin is now available in its first beta version!

Not only I managed to implement the basic idea of composing design and content elements on a canvas; by now the plugin became completely independent from your models and database structure!

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admin generator · admin-theme · Behaviours · Doctrine · gjPositionsPlugin · LooseCoupling · Plugin · plugins · Separation of Concerns · symfony

As you can guess I am still working on the gjPositionsPlugin. One of its features is that you can position (hence the name) “design elements” on a canvas. A design element is basically a component or partial.

But design elements can be parameterised. For instance how many items they render in a list. At the time this element is positioned on the canvas it can only be rendered with the default parameters. If you change these parameters in your form the rendition has to change but this can only happen if you submit the form and save the object.

Unless there would be a kind of non-persisting save function.. a preview..

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admin generator · admin-theme · Doctrine · forms · gjPositionsPlugin · symfony

Some time ago I blogged about how to develop symfony admin themes and I really think that they are a far underestimated feature.

But once you started you will soon realise that for most of your changes clearing the symfonyn cache is mandatory in order to see the effect.

This is a major pain in my backside right now so I had a look how to disable all use of the cache completely. It’s not as easy as you might think..
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admin generator · admin-theme · symfony

I am currently working heavily on the gjPositionsPlugin which concept and idea I blogged about earlier. One part that I didn’t like too much and that als Ryan Weaver pointed out to me is that I limited its use to a single model class.

Now I wanted to change that and turned the functionality from being attached to a model to being a behaviour instead. I then realised that being model independant will not easily allow me to provide functionality in an admin module. Then I remebered admin generator themes. And started building one.

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admin generator · admin-theme · Doctrine · forms · Propel · symfony