Pascal Borreli came up with a great idea to involve the symfony developer community and advance the development of the framework. The event is called one-day-one-ticket and it will give monthly prizes to the developer that fixes the most bugs in symfony. While it is still a good idea to contribute to the community anyway and get your merit badges, a little extra incentive always helps.

This post on the Symfony blog gets more into the details of the contest. To enter you have to sign up and close one ticket a day for the month. You'll then be entered to win one of that month's prizes including copies of books, a "surprise gift" or a contribution from ServerGrove.

By saying that I would be taking on this [project] myself, I mean the back end, after all my designing skills are very limited and I had given up on creating nice UI long time ago. Will, the UI dude would be making this thing look nice. So after accepting the project, I had started reading on what is going on with PHP, and guess what, there have been some incredible things that were released since I last worked on PHP. Which should not be a surprise, progress can't be stopped, just me with my deep submersion into .Net stayed completely oblivious to this part of coding. This is how I found Codeigniter.

He talks about the enjoyable experience he had using and developing with the framework, the documentation included, the community around it and how fast it let him develop his app.

As you might know, symfony tasks are classes. As any other class, it is pretty easy to customize and extend the existing tasks; except for one of them: the generate:project task. That's because no project exists when you execute this task, and so there is no way to customize it... until now.

Previously, when generating a project, you were limited in the control of how things were set up. With this new feature you can define (via an --installer option) a configuration script that gives you several new methods to call: installDir, runTask, logging tools, filesystem operations and, of course, any other standard PHP functionality (since it's just a PHP script, after all).

Developers are notoriously self-confident in their ability to write code that is better, faster, cleaner and better-smelling than everybody else's. In today's environment, however, the focus is on producing immediately useful code'"and, given the richness of today's frameworks, those who eschew them in favour of home-grown solutions are forever running the risk of reinventing the wheel for no good reason. We have enough wheels'"start building some cars.

He suggests that, with all of the "reinventing the wheel" that's been going on and overpowering frameworks that are out there, that developers need to take a step back and find a framework that fits for them. Coding from scratch (usually) isn't a good option - there's almost always a framework or application based on one out there that'll fit with just what you need.

Pick a framework that has a thriving community and then spend the time to learn it. Quit re-inventing the wheel, start using the wheel to solve your client's problems. Get out there and build them a car.

Why spend valuable time coding everything by hand? Using a framework is a great way to save time and effort on your next project'"you'll have a firm foundation to build upon, there will be pre-built modules to perform tedious coding tasks, and if you're a learner, it's a great way to learn about good coding practice. PHP's massive popularity means that developers have a wide variety of frameworks to choose from. We're sure you can find one amongst these 16 to meet your needs.

Here's some of the frameworks that made the list:

• Agavi
• CodeIgniter
• eZ components
• PHP on TRAX
• Seagull
• Zend Framework

As announced when we released it initially, the support for the 1.1 version of symfony comes to its end - targeted for the end of June 2009. [...] For those of you who can't upgrade the PHP version they use in production, e.g. those using and running the latest long-term support RHEL, you will be pleased to know that security-related patches will be applied during one more year to the 1.1 branch. So your existing project running Symfony 1.1 on PHP 5.1 are safe until June 2010.

There's an upgrade guide to help you make the switch to the latest version.

I attended the talk Framework? No thank you, I will use my own!, this week at IPC 2009 SE. The idea of the session was to get a discussion running about if you should use one of the many existing OSS PHP frameworks out there, or if you go better with building one on your own. [...] The result was quite obvious for many reasons already beforehand: Use an OSS framework! While I fully agree with this result, I stated a somewhat controversial thesis right at the beginning of that talk, mainly to get the discussion running.

Tobias looks at the official definition (via Wikipedia) and looks at how that compares to the more specific definition of a software framework. He talks about creating a framework - not from scratch but possibly standing on the shoulders of another OSS framework.

This new tutorial aims to become the definitive place to find all information related to the symfony installation process. It describes in great details everything you need to know to install symfony correctly. The goal is to also provide a single resource for people wanting to try out the framework and avoid discouraging them with a bad installation experience.

You can find the new tutorial and a newly rewritten installation guide on the cleaned up symfony homepage.

If you really want to improve your PHP skills to be at the enterprise level, you must read this book. Despite there are several other PHP books about OOP, I have never seen a book that addresses the subject so deeply and, at the same time, keeping it simple.

The reviewer looks at what the book covers - PHP6, documentation, Phing, SPL and much more. Check out the full review for more on what the reviewer thought.

Not all frameworks support true models and this is one thing that really sets the Solar Framework apart from a lot of frameworks. So what sets Solar apart? Lets replicate what Zend Framework references on models in Solar.. You can find the ZF Docs Here.

After noting that the Zend Framework doesn't fully support true models, instead opting for creating database obejcts and getters/setters to "model" the database behind it. Solar, on the other hand, has a full model class to extend with the ability to perform validation, set up relationships and an example of how it all can be put to use.