centre{source}
INTERACTIVE AGENCY
Web Development
Software
Deploying symfony Applications with Capistrano
Capistrano is an open source tool for running scripts on multiple servers. It’s primary use is for easily deploying applications. While it was built specifically for deploying Rails apps, it’s pretty simple to customize it to deploy other types of applications. We’ve been working on creating a deployment “recipe” to work with symfony applications to make our job a lot easier.
Prerequisites
- Must have SSH access to the server you are deploying to.
- Must have Ruby and RubyGems installed on your machine (not required for deployment server)’
Installing Capistrano
sudo gem install capistrano
Setup your project to use Capistrano
cd path/to/your/app
capify .
“I feel the need… the need for speed!”
For anyone (like myself) who has been religiously following Google and the amazing things that they have done to improve people’s experience on the web, you would have noticed a pattern in December 2009 of “speed.” The reasons for their speed obsession are clearly justified; a user’s experience on the web is made or broken by the speed at which they are able to browse, including the initial page load, the responsiveness of the interactive components, and the number of clicks to get to retrieve their desired information.
As such, Google has been busy releasing various tools to help with user’s experiences on the web:
Choosing the Right Tool for the Job
At CentreSource, we have a motto that “outcomes always outweigh the output.” Through this, we try to focus on meeting the individual goals of our clients, versus focusing on the process of how they get done. One goal we often hear is that our clients would like an easy way to update the website themselves. By using a Content Management System (CMS), we enable our clients to accomplish this — without having to install anything on their computers, or know too much about how websites work.
Over the history of CentreSource, we’ve worked hard to choose the perfect CMS to be able to meet the individual needs of each client and project that comes our way. There was always a balance that had to be struck — it couldn’t be too cookie-cutter, or else we wouldn’t be able to do everything that the client was asking. Conversely, it wouldn’t be cost efficient if we had to custom build a CMS for our clients each time. By focusing on the outcome (the client’s goal of an easy-to-update website), we decided that the best single CMS option was not a single option at all, but instead a “toolbox” approach that would allow us to use the appropriate tool for each unique job.
Try some Open Source… Everybody’s Doing it
As the founder of centresource, I’ve always been tasked with choosing solutions that yield the best ROI - period. To that point, Open Source technologies have become an integral part of our business and as a result, also our personal lives. We don’t choose/use them simply because they’re free (in fact, some cost money) - we use them because they represent an excellent solution to an existing need.
Digital Nashville asked me to speak on the subject at their next Education Series. You can see the invite on Facebook (here) or on the actual Digital Nashville site (here). I’ll go through a variety of scenarios where Open Source technologies provide a wonderful solution - ranging from work-related to fun!
GMail/Google Calendar Integration
Google, why hast thou forsaken us? A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, GMail had this great feature that was a defining reason in my switch from my previous mail provider (me). That was that if you ever got a message that had any sort of “event” — various combinations of a date, time and place — gmail would detect it and automatically create a link on the right sidebar to “Add to calendar”.
Centresource Releases New Plugins to the Symfony Community
Over the last week, the developers here at CentreSource have published nine plugins for the symfony community. The plugins have been used in several of our internal projects and client web applications, but have been developed on a private repository. We finally decided the plugins were properly documented and tested. These plugins can be found here.
1) csDoctrineActAsAttachablePlugin - associates various uploads with multiple models, and includes an AJAX uploading client interface.
2) csDoctrineActAsCategorizablePlugin - associates models into nestable categories and category groups.
3) csDoctrineActAsGeolocatablePlugin - integrate your model with the Google Maps API to pull in geocodes based on record fields. Supports radius and proximity searches.
Firefox 3 Beta 4
Some of us at centre{source} have been running the latest version Firefox (version 3) which is currently in it’s beta stages. It’s VERY cool and VERY fast…Beta 3 Release 4 just came out today: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.0b4&os=osx
After installing, we were extremely happy to notice that Flash is once again working as expected, and it’s all running a lot faster and more stable. It definitely is a huge improvement over Firefox 3 Beta 3 (which itself was light-years of improvement over Firefox 2!)
Try it out, and let us know what you think!
Website Grabber | Offline Browser
Today, we had a client call us and ask if we can ’save’ their website from an aggressive website designer that is holding their site hostage. I told them yes and thought an easy solution would be to find a utility that allowed us to easily clone/grab their website. I must say, I was surprised at the difficulty in finding a free utility to do this.
Part of the problem came from the search terms I started with. I thought this would be called a ’site grabber’ - and many paid utilities thought the same :) I then switched to Website Clone, but to no avail. Finally, I that download.com called these utilities “Offline Browsers”. Doing a quick search for Offline Browser struck gold!
PHP Doctrine ORM: Release Candidate 1 - August 31st 2007
The much anticipated PHP Doctrine ORM is nearing a stable release. After a long Google Summer of Code, Konsta Vesterinen, also known as zYne- in IRC, has tentatively scheduled the first release candidate for August 31st. This is very exciting for the PHP community as it fills a gap that has existed in PHP since its existence. Stay tuned for more information on this great news.
symfony 1.0.2 maintenance release
From the symfony-project.com website, they announced the release of symfony 1.0.2.
The bug fixes include:
* r3785: fixed getCookies() call in sfDebug when using sfConsoleResponse (#1666)
* r3775: fixed _compute_public_path() when using a query string
* r3754: updated Propel to 1.2.1 (http://propel.phpdb.org/trac/query?status=closed&milestone=1.2.1&resolution=fixed&order=priority)
* r3746: fixed output escaping and _get_object_list() (#1593)
* r3699: fixed highlight_text() doesn’t work with / (#1621)
* r3692: fixed i18n support for errors in sfRequest
