Symfony 1.1 extends symfony 1.0 pake tasks to create a powerful and uniform command line utility for your projects, fully integrated with the symfony Command Line Interface (CLI).

This means that is has the abilities to automatically support a "help" parameter, to grab a current task list the app is using, correct handling of the input parameters, set up a good environment and make sure that the source is readable. The post shows how to create a new task for your application - their examples are a "doNothingTask" that, well, does a lot of nothing and the typical "doHelloWorldTask" that just echoes.

They show how to define the task (including a namespace for it) and how to run it, outputing the results of the execute() method ("I did nothing successfully!" in the first case and a string of passed in parameters in the second.

Scheduled tasks are a fairly common feature in modern web applications. From cleaning out caches every 24 hours to checking subscription periods and even generating reports, more web applications live by the clock than ever before. But how do we schedule the execution of a PHP script on the server side?

He shows the two key things to getting it working - an example of a command-line call to a PHP script (executed through his /usr/bin/php) and an example of a line from a crontab showing how to execute the script at midnight every day.

Specifically, I will describe how I boot my PHP scripts and why I boot them the way I do. Part 1 shows how my requirements for code portability and maintainability influence the boot process. Part 2 will go into more detail about the specific steps executed by the boot code.

His basic task for the first example is to make a templating sort of system, calling a Navigation class to output links in list items. He outlines the goals of the project, what he's found for his current solution and some alternatives he's discovered along the way.

RTM is basically a TODO list on serious steroids. It's the Swiss Army Knife of task management. It allows you to manage multiple lists of tasks. You can add them easily from a variety of mediums, tag them, prioritize them, set deadlines for them, have them repeat, get reminders for them, tie them to physical real world location, and share them.

He's even already issued a proposal for the functionality to the project to hep further along its inclusion. His goal is to get it included in the core for the framework within the next two releases.

In this article, I will briefly explain all the significant changes of Symfony 1.1 so that you will have fewer doubts deciding between: rewrite part of your old code, simply update your application or use the new Symfony 1.1 only in new developments.

There's three things he mentions - the new task framework to help organize code development, the reorganization of the event dispatcher and its dependencies, and the new Form, Widget and Validator framework.

The "bake" utility is included with the CakePHP distribution and helps a developer scaffold out an application with minimal effort. Things have been changed in the recent distributions, though:

Unlike the old bake.php, which was only used to auto-generate code for you, this one follows a much cooler concept. The main idea is to have an interface to a wide variety Tasks.

The new and improved "bake" program takes the tasks created and builds out a bit more functionality than just the scaffolding as the version before did. Felix includes an example of a task (a simple echo) just to show how it's formatted.