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.

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.

There's a new post on Lukas Smith's blog where he talks about frameworks, phpBB's decision and building "gold on top of crap".

See the various symfony CMS solutions are an example of how wrong things can go. We now have several solutions whose architectural differences are either cosmetic or simply bad design decisions probably a result of trying to invent things in the small ecosystem of a company project team. So I was very happy to hear then that phpBB will adopt Symfony 2 for their next version. Hopefully this will become a role model for others.

He talks about how several of the popular CMS systems these days have worked harder on their external functionality than on the base (where they need the most work). He also looks towards a future where there are good, solid CMS solutions and leaders will emerge from the pack and provide quality content management for the PHP masses.

There's also some great discussion in the comments of the post with people who both share and disagree with some of Lukas' thoughts.

Anna Filina has posted a new item to her blog about some of her experiences with PHP 5.3 on the OS X platform including some of the different software she tried (like the Symfony framework).

I wanted to play with Symfony 2 and so needed to install PHP 5.3 on my OSX 10.5. What seemed like a simple task turned into a huge waste of my time. I use MAMP because it's a nice out-of-the-box solution. The problem is, it still doesn't ship with 5.3 because it's waiting for it to be "stable".

She tried to find a way to upgrade MAMP's installation to the latest stable version of PHP but was stopped by dependency errors and opted to go with XAMPP instead to get more of what she needed. She also has included a few edits to the post with more information - how to migrate your virtual hosts from MAMP to XAMPP and migrating over the MySQL structure.

In responding to some of the benchmarks posted about the speed and performance of Symfony 2 and how they truly compare to some of the other frameworks out there, Paul Jones has shared his thoughts and process on using his benchmarking system to get some differing results.

Fabien Potencier released Symfony 2.0.0alpha1 last week, along with some benchmarks showing its performance. I am glad to see that Fabien used my benchmarking system and methodology, and am happy to see that he is paying attention to the performance of his framework. I take this as an acceptance on his part that my methodology is legitimate and valid, and that it has value when comparing framework responsiveness.

Paul points out that Fabien's reporting is a bit inaccurate and goes on to talk about how his numbers are off and what a more correct version of the benchmarks would look like. He takes the testing methodology that Fabien used in his process and reapplies it to his benchmarking process using clean Amazon EC2 instances and Siege to run some response/request testing on software running on each framework. Numbers are run for three different comparisons and results are found...but you'll have to read the rest of the post to find those out.

In response to an announcement made by the phpBB group at the just-passed Symfony Live event about considerations being made to change the base platform to Symfony, Stefan Koopmanschap has posted an open letter to the phpBB community and development group with his thoughts on the potential move.

The past week was the week of Symfony Live 2010 in Paris. One of the people there was Nils Adermann, the new Lead Developer of the phpBB project. The biggest news was that phpBB is considering moving to Symfony 2 as the basis of their new version of phpBB: phpBB4.

There's an RFC posted for anyone that would like to reply back to the idea. In Stefan's response he mentions things that would be positive about the decision like not having to reinvent the wheel, getting the support of the pre-established Symfony community, making it easier to extend phpBB via Symfony code and a certain sense of security that comes with having the framework backing.

Following up on their Symfony Live conference just held in Paris last week, the Symfony blog has gathered together content from all around the web talking about the event and sharing some of the opinions from those who attended.

A conference such as Symfony Live always generates a lot of buzz. Especially when there are interesting announcements or rumours are made. This post will give you an overview of the community response to Symfony Live from various blogs and social networks.

There's plenty of content here - blog posts (in multiple languages), pictures on Flickr, a video on Vimeo and plenty of Twitter posts based on the "#sflive2010" hastag. The overall impression was great and it seemed like just about everyone in attendance (well, of those that posted about it) seemed to enjoy the event.

You can also read some of the Symfony blog's own recaps of Day 1 and Day 2 for more specifics of what happened each day.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney (of the Zend Framework project) had an opportunity to attend the Symfony Live event held in Paris and presented on integrating the two frameworks (usually seen as rivals by much of the PHP community).

To be honest, I was a little worried about the conference -- many see Symfony and ZF as being in competition, and that there would be no cross-pollination. I'm hoping that between Fabien, Stefan, and myself, we helped dispel that myth this week. The fact of the matter is that no single project can be fully comprehensive, and do everything perfectly.

He talks a bit more about the real difference between most of the MVC frameworks out there (tooling and communities) and each framework's development goals. Matthew's goal was to show Symfony developers that it's not just about staying within the ecosystem of your selected framework when developing - you need to branch out and find the right tool for the job. Sometimes that's found in the Zend Framework, other times it's elsewhere.

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial about using the Symfony framework to create and modify a sample application.

Symfony is an open-source PHP web framework that provides architecture, components and tools for developers to build and maintain complex web applications faster. The Symfony framework uses the MVC architecture to make the web applications a lot easier and faster to modify.

They walk through a brief look at the MVC pattern before getting into how Symfony can automatically create a base project (using the command line "symfony" tool), how to configure your Apache server and how to get a database up and working with some sample data. The code for their sample site is available for download.