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 .

This will create a few files for you. It will create a Capfile in the root of your project. It will also create a directory named config (if it doesn’t exist already) and place a file named deploy.rb in the config folder. That’s where you will add/change any application-specific settings for your deployment recipe.

Here are the required settings (just replace with your app-specific variables):

Customize Capistrano for symfony

Now, to get capistrano to play nice with symfony, we have to override some of the built-in functions. You’ll want to add this to your deploy.rb file:

Now, you can start the deployment process! To get your server setup with the file structure that Capistrano expects, you can run

cap deploy:setup

This command will create the following folder structure on your server:

|-- deploy_to_path
  |-- current (symlink)
  |-- releases
    |-- 20100512131539
    |-- 20100509150741
    |-- 20100509145325
  |-- shared
    |-- cached-copy
    |-- log
    |-- pids
    |-- system

The folders in the releases directory will be the actual deployed code, timestamped. The pids folder in the shared directory is only used for Rails applications, so you can ignore it completely. Capistrano symlinks your log directory from your app to the log directory in the shared folder so that it doesn’t get erased when you deploy a new version of your code.

This is an important step! Before you deploy the application for the first time, it’s really a good idea to scp your databases.yml file up to your server so you can set the proper credentials for your production server and keep it out of your repository. Make sure you put the databases.yml file into the shared/system directory, because we already have a task that will symlink it when each new code version is deployed.

Now, to deploy your application for the first time, you can run:

cap deploy:cold

This will deploy your application, create the db, models, forms, filters, and run all of your migrations.

Now, whenever you need to deploy a new version of your code, you can just run:

cap deploy

If you need to deploy and run your migrations you can call:

cap deploy:migrations

We’ve also added a custom task to run your test suite on the production server. You can invoke this by calling:

cap deploy:testall

This will deploy the application, rebuild the test database, then run all of the tests.

If you want to see all of the Capistrano tasks available, you can run:

cap -T

We’ve been using this setup for a little while now, and it’s saved us a ton of time when we need to push changes for a site to the production server.

As such, Google has been busy releasing various tools to help with user’s experiences on the web:

Google Chrome

Ok, so this technically came out for Windows in 2008, but was released fully cross-platform in 2009. Chrome (and its subsequent big brother “Chrome OS”) is an open-source browser that borrows components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox (both open-source projects) and aims to “add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.” As of January 4, 2010, Chrome had officially passed Apple’s Safari browser to become the 3rd most popular browser behind Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Real-Time Search

As Twitter has grown in popularity, it has quickly become the first source for breaking news, mostly due to the ease and speed with which you can post information. In Q4 2009, Google signed a deal with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and FriendFeed (among others) to allow search results from each of their sites to be propagated into the Google search result page. The benefit of this is that one can get to-the-second results of what they’re looking for — all in one place.

Webmaster Tools

While improving the end-users’ tools can greatly improve usability and performance, Google acknowledged that individual site optimization is key to a successful user experience by releasing a variety of webmaster tools to help web developers identify slow parts of their site, and provide tips on how to improve those areas. One group of tools was added to Google Analytics under the new “Site Performance” section, that gives an analysis of your site’s performance relative to the rest of the web, as well as particular suggestions on improving page speed. This is particularly helpful in identifying over-arching tips and tricks that can improve the loading speed of your site as a whole.

The second tool is a Firefox extension called “Page Speed” that takes the analysis provided in the “Site Performance” section, and moves it to the browser, allowing you to view specific recommendations on a page-by-page basis. This is particularly helpful in identifying very specific ways to improve the speed of a particular page that might be loading slower than others on your site.

The third tool is a Chrome extension called “Speed Tracer.” This tool is more geared towards the performance of web applications, focusing less on the initial load time, and more on the strain that using the website itself puts on the user’s browser. Using Speed Tracer, you can pinpoint exactly what scripts, actions, or files are causing your website to appear to slow down.

Public DNS

The nerdiest most technical tool that Google announced was their hosting of a Public DNS server. DNS, or Domain Name System, is an essential part of the web that helps translate domain names (”blog.centresource.com”) into the unique Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of the computers where the website files live. By providing a Public DNS, Google plans to not only optimize the hundreds of DNS requests that the average user makes every day, but also to gather data about user’s browsing patterns “to improve the browsing experience for Internet users globally.”

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.

WordPress

For basic blog / news sites with a few “static” pages, there is no better option out there than the open source platform, WordPress.  WordPress has a simple, intuitive administrative interface, and is designed and built around the concept of two types of content: posts and pages.  Thanks to their fairly extensive documentation and an incredible user community, there are thousands of WordPress tutorials, examples, and plugins available that can help you to maximize the capabilities of WordPress to it’s fullest.  Although there are some plugins out there (one in particular called Flutter) that allow you to expand WordPress into a more feature-rich CMS (with multiple content types, for example), we have found that doing so is like pushing a boulder uphill.  It can be done, but it’s more work than it’s worth — especially with other, more feature-rich CMSes out there (see below).  All in all, though, WordPress is an excellent basic tool for basic websites.

Sitemason

Next in our toolbox is a local company that CentreSource has used since we first open our doors, and has never let us down since.  Sitemason is a proprietary CMS that has expanded over the years to allow its users to edit pages, news, forms, polls, photos, and calendars.  Once you’re trained on their administrative interface, adding and editing content is a breeze, as heavy-hitter clients like Vanderbilt University, ABHOW (American Baptist Homes of the West),  Waller Lansden Dortch & Davis, or TrustCore Financial can attest to.  Their team of developers are constantly refining and adding to their tools, taking guidance and recommendations from the users and developers that use their system.  As a result, Sitemason has proven to be an invaluable tool for our low- to mid-level sites.

Drupal

Over the past few years, Drupal has taken off as the de facto CMS for open source developers.  Advertising itself as not only a CMS platform, but also a CMS framework, Drupal has an extensively flexible core that can be used to build modules to do just about anything you might want.  Drupal’s bread and butter is its ability to create custom content types (a piece of content with defined custom fields), and then a system to view the content in many different ways (lists, grids, tables, blocks, etc).  Additionally, Drupal specializes in social-based tools, making it a perfect platform for bands, politicians, or churches.  For any high-level content-based site that is too demanding for WordPress or SiteMason, Drupal is the perfect tool for the job.

Symfony

While not really a CMS, the Symfony framework allows us to custom build anything that can’t be done with the tools above.  Symfony is a PHP framework that provides an architecture for developers to build complex web applications faster.  Using Symfony allows us to build the exact tool that our client is wanting — something that is necessary in circumstances where the workflow is just as important as the final outcome.  Using Symfony, we’ve been able to build complex order and shipment fulfillment systems and social-based file sharing and recommendation systems — sites that would not have been able to be found “out-of-the-box,” but that were needed based on our client’s goals.

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!

It didn’t always get it 100% right, but even if it didn’t, it was still a convenient shortcut and it would get a majority of the info right. It was also amazingly good at picking “events” out of e-mail — either casual e-mail from a person or automated/invite type messages.

Then one day, it disappeared. Poof. Gone. Has anyone else noticed this? Does it still exist for anyone else out there? Is it unique to traditional gmail versus google apps?

Google, please bring this back, or I swear on the Golden Kraut I’ll have my revenge!

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.

4) csDoctrineActAsSortablePlugin - adds a sortable behavior to your models

5) csDoctrineSlideshowPlugin - add and configure slideshows in your project.

6) csFormTransformPlugin -  give your forms a web 2.0 look within a few easy steps.

7) csGlossaryPlugin - group your models alphabetically in glossary/directory format

8) csSEOToolkitPlugin - A toolkit to improve your website’s search engine optimization.

9) sfSympalSlideshowPlugin - An advanced slideshow used for the Sympal Content Management Framework.

You can check out my plugin list here.  If you are interested in using these plugins, or have any suggestions for addition useful symfony plugins, please contact me or any of the developers here at CentreSource.

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!

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!

I found an open-source utility called HTTrack (http://www.httrack.com/) that does exactly what I needed.  Website saved!

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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

Here is the full link on symfony-project.com.