It has never been so easy to internationalize your Propel forms. In this post, you will learn how to leverage the new form framework bundled with symfony 1.1 to develop an interface to edit articles in several languages.

He uses a basic form layout and shows how to build out the files (via a build-all) and what it ends up looking like. He configures the two languages - English and French - that he wants to use in the form and pushes it through the CRUD generator to make a full web interface for it.

Starting with symfony 1.1, it is now possible to easily use Propel 1.3 in your project to take advantage of its speed improvements, nested set implementation, object instance pooling, among others. Most importantly, Propel 1.3 uses PDO instead of Creole as the DBAL, offering a significant performance boost.

There's a few steps to getting everything all set up, but they're pretty simple. First, you'll need to grab the right plugin from the Symfony repository, then you change the yml file configuration for the PDO connection, change a few settings in your propel.ini and clear the cache and rebuild the models - you're all set! (Complete commands and example configurations are included)

Eventually the simple distance formula that I have blogged about turned out to be too inaccurate, even for locations within city bounds. I needed to use a formula to calculate great-circle distance which takes into account that the Earth is a sphere.

He includes the SQL to pull the data in the right format and the PHP code (using Propel) to reproduce it without having to write it by hand (complete with the bind variables to help with security and consistency).

What is Geeklog_Generator? It's a package that compliments the great ORM implementation, Propel. What's missing from Propel, you ask? First and foremost, it's always annoyed me that Propel (more concisely, the Propel Generator) doesn't generate pure PHP model objects...objects that don't need to include a bunch of persistence level code.

Geeklog_Generator gets around this by building minimal, pure PHP models (called Data Transfer Objects or DTO for short) that can not only be passed around easily via web services but it also but they can be quickly turned into the persistable Propel objects.

Changes made for this release include "massive updates in preparation for GL2 GSoC and scafolding". You can grab the latest version of the package from its PEAR repository.