On DZone.com John Esposito has a new post sharing two Symfony2 bundle repositories you can look to to improve your development experience with the framework - KnpBundles and Symfohub.

If you're using Symfony2, you already know that the framework uses 'bundles', the equivalent of plugins, if the core counted as a plugin too. (The official documentation calls bundles 'first-class citizens' in Symfony2.) So far so great idea, but an ecosystem depends on a community, and a community needs some kind of organization. So how is the Symfony2 bundle community organized, and how do you find existing third-party bundles?

KnpBundles provides a larger resource than Symfohub, but both have handy features to help you find what you're looking for - filtering, search recommendations and rankings.

PHPBuilder.com has a new tutorial posted about interfacing with GitHub in PHP, using their API to hook into and pull down information about users and repositories.

The Git-based project hosting service GitHub is certainly the belle of today's technology ball, having attracted more than 1 million registered users and amassed more than 2 million hosted projects in less than three years. [...] GitHub High Scores and GitHub Badges are two examples of third-party services created using the GitHub API, which is capable of carrying out any task you might wish to perform via GitHub.com. With it you can create, edit and search repositories, learn more about fellow GitHub users, and manage repository issues.

Jason shows how to use the php-github-api library to connect to the API, search repository information, get user details, finding their repositories and accessing restricted resources (things only available for the authenticated user like updating your account or working with your own repositories).

In a recent post to his blog Stuart Herbert asks his readers where they get their Windows PHP binaries from - there's more than just windows.php.net out there after all.

I'm currently working out installation instructions for phix on Microsoft Windows before my sessions at PHPNW 11 and ZendCon in October...and I need your help, because it has been many years now since I used Windows. If you do your PHP development using Windows on the desktop or laptop, where do you prefer to get your copy of PHP from?

He offers a few options: the obvious windows.php.net, the Microsoft Web Platform or a package like XAMPP/WAMP. In the comments of the post favorites include the Web Platform Installer and windows.php.net with the package versions (XAMPP/WAMP) coming in behind.

Srdjan Vranac has a new post to his blog showing you how to create a custom repository with the dependency injection features that already come with the Symfony2 framework.

I am currently working on some Symfony2 bundles, I needed a custom repository to house hold my custom queries, that part is easy with sf2, and quite nicely explained in the Manual.

He walks you through the setup of a simple custom repository (a part of a Code4Hire bundle) and a (less elegant) call that can be used to reference it and its methods. To make things a big more clean and take advantage of the full dependency injection features of the framework, he makes a change to move the repository into the services.xml. This defines the container and makes it available to the application directly in function calls (like his render() example near the end of the post).

Jani Hartikainen has posted his technique for making the Doctrine version 1 style "soft delete" in your Doctrine 2 powered application.

Doctrine 1 has the concept of behaviors which you could add to your models. One of these was the soft-delete behavior, which allowed you to "delete" records without really deleting them. Doctrine 2 does not have behaviors due to various reasons. However, I needed a way to have a model which worked like soft-delete. Let's see one approach to creating such behavior in Doctrine 2.

He introduces the idea of a "soft delete" - essentially a flag that gets set to let the rest of the application think that row is essentially deleted. He shows you how to create the similar functionality via a repository that filters the data for you. He includes code to help you along, defining the find/findOneBy/findBy and the example repository that lets you set an "is deleted" property on the object.

New on the Zend Developer Zone today is an article from Shahar Evron about mirroring Zend Server repositories to re-serve them out, either to a different community or as a part of your internal processes.

There are several good reasons to mirror a Linux repository, be it the Zend repositories or any other repository. The most simple reason is sheer performance: if you need to install Zend Server on a number of machines, you can save a lot of valuable time by creating a local mirror of the repositories, and using that mirror as your installation source for all servers.

He also points out that it can save on bandwidth used - pulling from local will always be more efficient. It also gives you more control about exactly what software is installed on your servers. He breaks the mirroring process up into four steps (with a few added helpful hints at the end):

• Copy the Zend Server repository to a local machine
• Local Repository Test
• Enable network access to your local repository
• Configure clients to use your local repository

Just a quick note today from the CodeIgniter project - if you've been using their Subversion server to pull your latest copies of the framework down, they've made a change.

Our Subversion repositories have moved. Please update your repositories or check out new ones from the new location: http://svn.ellislab.com/CodeIgniter/trunk

The normal downloads (and archive files) are still available on the CodeIgniter download page.

Sebastian Bergmann, developer of the PHPUnit unit testing software for PHP, has posted about a major move of the source code for the project over to github.

I was hearing more and more positive things about Git and GitHub from my peers. So I took the PHP_ObjectFreezer code base and migrated it to Git and hosted the repository and GitHub to experiment with both the tool and the platform. It was a step that I did not regret and all the projects that I started since then are hosted on GitHub: bytekit-cli, phpcpd, phpdcd, phploc, PHP_CodeCoverage, PHP_FileIterator, PHP_ObjectFreezer, Text_Template, PHP_TokenStream.

He explains some of his thinking behind the move and why he moved towards a distributed version control model rather than something like subversion. So, if you're looking for the latest sources for PHPUnit, you'll find them here. (He also includes the steps he took to import the code into github by making use of the svn2git tool).

Giorgio Sironi has recently posted a look at one of the more popular design patterns - the Repository pattern. He talks about how it can be used for two things: to create a collection of objects and the reuse of queries and their results.

A common infrastructure problem of an object-oriented application is how to deal with persistence and retrieval of objects. The most common way to obtain references to entities (for example, instances of the User, Group and Post class of a domain) is through navigation from another entity. [...] A Repository implementation provides the illusion of having an in-memory collection available, where all the objects of a certain class are kept

He gives an example of a method that grabs user information and encapsulate the database access for it so that it's not required to hit it for every run through their unit tests. He shows how to set up the interface for a GroupRepository and how to implement it in the test.

If you're a fan of the Git version control library and have been wanting to work with your Zend Framework applications in it, Matthew Weier O'Phinney's blog has a post you should read. He's worked up a method to clone the Zend Framework repository in a Git instance.

I've been using Git for around a year now. My interest in it originally was to act as a replacement for SVK, with which I'd had some bad experiences (when things go wrong with svk, they go very wrong).

He steps through the full process, providing a basic introduction to cloning in Git as well as how to define the correct settings in Git's config file to grab the latest version from the Zend Framework site.