For the Symfony developers out there, sometimes it's easy to forget a few things when it comes to getting your application ready for deployment. The Symfony-check site is here to help. It has a list of things to consider before you go live like:

• checking the "Oops! An Error Occurred" error page
• checking the "Credentials Required" error page
• ensuring a favicon exists
• test the production server to be sure it's ready for the Symfony application
• setting up the escaping

Each of these items (and many more) give more information when you click on them of how to perform the check and a checkbox next to it so you can work your way through it easily.

On the Symfony blog there's a recent post from David Herrmann looking at how to run a TV station (well, its website at least) using the Symfony framework on top of a few other various technologies.

When I (David Hermann) joined OktoLab in mid-2008, we had to face some serious challenges. The previous (and at that time only) developer had abandoned the company at short notice and left a mess of various software services that were either loosely or not at all coupled. [...] This situation was not caused by the developer, it was a result of the evolution of the company. The situation had gotten out of hand though, so there was a huge pressure to improve it.

His choice of framework for this new software tool was, obviously, Symfony and he combined it with some javascript/ajax, working with the external-facing APIs the other data sources had and what all of his work got for him and the company - a 30% drop in how long it took to get things done.

On the InsicDesigns blog there's a new tutorial on using the MiMViC framework

MiMViC is a modular and lightweight PHP 5.3+ Web application framework designed to help build dynamic and robust Web sites. It's theory is based on minimal and framework emphasizes on only core glue for your complex PHP web sites. Today I will show you how to create a shout-box using the MiMViC framework. It won't take you more than 15 mins to get the job done and have friendly URLs as well.

Sample code for the "shoutbox" is included. Their example shows an Apache setup and a MySQL backend (complete with namespace-enabled code). A simple form to take in a "shout" works directly with the framework to save the information quickly and easily.

Recently Brandon Savage has been really getting into the Zend Framework and creating applications with it. He, like many other developers just starting out with this framework, has had his share of frustrations. In the latest post to his blog Brandon looks at some of these first steps and what he's learned from them.

This immersion experience [into the Zend Framework] has brought out a few thoughts and lessons that I've learned through the process about how to get into a framework, how to start a new project using a framework you've never used before, and the best way to learn without losing your sanity.

He's broken it up into a few points with some good explanation of each:

Don't fight the framework.
• A little knowledge can be very dangerous.
• Learn when and where to ask for help.
• Have patience.

On of the frameworks rising up through the ranks is Lithium (created by some of the original CakePHP developers). In his latest post Chris Hartjes looks at the framework and a particularly useful feature it includes - filters.

As far as I can tell, Lithium is trying it's hardest to be fast, lightweight, and use all the features that PHP 5.3 has to offer. [...] I want to talk about something that I feel is a very underrated part of Lithium, the ability to define filters. This is a concept that you find in Aspect-oriented programming, and one that I imagine most programmers have never considered. Here's why I think it's a big deal.

The filters in Lithium allow you to use code from other classes without having to actually extend them. As Nate Abele says in one of the comments on the post:

While not having to extend classes or dig inside core functionality is certainly pretty central, the way I've been explaining it is that it's important because classes no longer need to know anything about each other in order to be integrated.

You can find out more about the Lithium project (and RAD-Dev) on the project's wiki.

On the EllisLabs site there's a recent post talking about some of the big changes that've happened to their development process surrounding CodeIgniter and its future version.

EllisLab today announces changes to our internal development processes, including dropping Subversion in favor of Mercurial and adopting Assembla as our agile software development management tool. Along with these changes, CodeIgniter 2.0 pre-release code is in development, and is now hosted at the Mercurial-focused social coding site BitBucket.

They also talk about their move to the Scrum method of software development and how this (and their change of version control system) can help the future of CodeIgniter (version 2.0) come even sonoer through contributed updates and bugfixes made much simpler through the features of BitBucket (similar to Github). If you'd like to contribute, you can follow the CodeIgniter project and get busy contributing back to this great framework.

As mentioned on Solar blog and a few other places on the web, the stable 1.0.0 version of the Solar PHP framework has been released, marking a significant milestone in the framework's development.

Yesterday, I announced the release of the 1.0.0 stable version of the Solar Framework for PHP on our mailing list. (I tagged the release four days ago on Monday, but wanted to time the announcement to go along with my Solar presentation at ConFoo.)

The Changelog for the release can be found here and some of the latest updates include improved CSRF features, named actions and optimized queries.

This stable release is the culmination of about five years of development effort, with important contributions from several others in the PHP community. My many thanks to everyone who helped make this release, and all the previous releases, better than I could have made it on my own.

Ian Christian has an informative new post for the Symfony developers out there. He's figured out a way to handle uploaded files with Symfony's admin generator relatively easily, changing the filename option.

When a file is uploaded using sfForm in the admin generator, by default the filename that's used is a random string, which can look bad in URLs. If you want to change this, it's not immediately obvious how - but it is incredibly simple.

The Symfony project does have some documentation on the topic, but it's not the easiest to read. It basically boils down to is defining a function in your extended class based on the name of the file where you can change the name however you'd like. Code snippets are included to make the point a bit more clear.

Michael Wales has taken a look at what effect HipHop could have on your CodeIgniter application (or lack there of).

So, what does this mean for the CodeIgniter community? In short, absolutely nothing. Most CodeIgniter developers are building applications that will run on shared hosts, virtual private servers or a cloud-based virtualization system. Of that very large group of our community, an extremely small number have the capability to compile the HipHop binaries or alter their configuration in order to serve HipHop pages.

He points out that, for most developers and applications, time is better spent optimizing the actual application - things like reducing the I/O needs, caching, etc. HipHop, unless you have a very high demand and load on the application, won't give much of a gain. He gives the example of Facebook's load and how even it would only relatively recently would benefit from the tool.

In a new post to his blog Padraic Brady takes a humorous look at benchmarking PHP frameworks in a response to some of the other recent posts from developers on the Symfony and Solar frameworks.

Some recent attention in the PHP framework community has been focused on the recent publication of Symfony 2 Preview benchmarks showing that Symfony 2 outperforms Zend Framework by a factor of 3.5. It also outperforms every other benchmarked framework. [...] My fellow Zend Frameworkers, we cannot allow this to stand. [...] I have created the benchmark of benchmarks. Well, to be honest, I only really edited another benchmark. But still, it will prove Zend Framework is faster than everything else out there.

His benchmarks are a little different from the rest with both the usual comparisons between the framework request numbers and a bit of explanation on how the Zend Framework came out on top - he cheated. What it really boiled down to was how the code that was tested was written. His code was optimized in a few different ways (All-in vs the Optimized/More-Optimized/What-The-Fuck-Optimized) and he includes custom benchmarks to show how they differ. What it really boils down to from his perspective is simply put:

Benchmarks. Useless. Final words? Know your framework! All this benchmarking nonsense does little good unless it's plastered with disclaimers.