We will be rebuilding ZDZ from the ground up and in full public view of the community -- to act as a learning experience and a showcase for PHP best practices. [...] And the best way for it to be a showcase is for us to make all of the process of working on the infrastructure completely transparent; to make the artifacts (code, scripts, configuration, machine images) readily available and to allow contributions from the community.

There's some more specific topics he mentions that the site will cover including new features on articles and community interaction, a new infrastructure and new processes including things like Agile development, testing and deployment. In one of his first steps to better the site, however, he learned a lesson the hard way when he tried to upgrade a package and it brought the site to a grinding halt.

Throughout my history of working with Symfony, I've noticed a trend that I'll make a minor edit in a database configuration file, forget to actually regenerate the models and forms, commit the edit, and then find several days later (when I do want to regenerate the models) that they're breaking. I then do this little dance of going through the history finding out where exactly I went wrong.

To remedy the situation he came up with a pre-commit hook that does the following:

• rebuilds SQL from schemas
• rebuilds models
• rebuilds forms
• rebuilds filters
• inserts sample SQL data
• loads all data from the fixture files

Full example code for the hook is included in the post.

I decided as I was learning/using Symfony at my contract at the time that it would be a good experiment to write it in Symfony. [...] The site did fairly well when I posted but I still posted in frequently.

After redefining the site's purpose a bit, he reconsidered the language (and framework) choice and decided to do a rewrite in Rails. He gives a comparison of the process on things like lines of code, time to build, performance differences, deployment and automated testing.

Somehow, I managed to erase the entirety of pear.chiaraquartet.net's database, although I have no idea how or when. In other words, all developers, release history, packages were wiped. Needless to say, I am a wee bit pissed off. Until I can find a decent backup, I will reconstruct the entire thing from scratch.

If you have any information that would help him rebuild this resource, please let him know - I know he'll appreciate it.]]> Mon, 10 Apr 2006 07:02:07 -0500 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/5118 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/5118 Brett Zamir has some suggestions for the PHP documentation group in his new post on the Zend Developer Network.

The folks working on the official PHP Documentation have done a marvellous job in providing a mostly easy to follow documentation, with good examples. However, as with anything, there can still be some improvement. I see two shortcomings and these have to do with structure rather than content, and I think the community can help solve them.

There's two things he suggests can be done to help refine the documentation process, including a move into a more wiki-style environment (with the content under a fully open license). Specifically, he suggests making a move to Wikibooks to encourage more participation from the PHP community.]]> Thu, 06 Apr 2006 07:01:36 -0500