On the symfony blog today, there's a new post that looks at creating a conditional validator in the context of a classic login form for the framework.

Jon works on a symfony 1.1 project with a classic login form. The form is composed of two fields: a username and a password. The validation rules are quite straightforward: he wants each field to be required and he wants to check the correctness of the password.

They show how to set up a normal login widget and how to apply a sfValidatorCallback in the configure() method to check the values in the form. This method checks the username and password values and tosses an error with sfValidatorError if a problem is found.

Thomas Weidner has posted about a method he's come up with to help protect you and your site when uploading files through the Zend_File_Transfer component from the Zend Framework.

The new Zend_File_Transfer component is growing day for day. As incredible new feature this component allows to use file validators. These are necessary to increase security and allow to define rules for file uploads (and also downloads in future).

He illustrates with a simple Zend_File_Transfer object that uses an addValidators call to limit the size of the upload to 50 KB. Other validation rules include count (the number of files to expect), extension, filessize and imagesize. Using these he makes a "more secure" upload object setting the size to 205KB, to expect five files that are all under 1MB and are of the types gif/jpg/png.

On the Symfony-framework.com website, there's a look at what's new in the latest Symfony build, version 1.1, as presented by Fabien Potencier at this year's International PHP Conference 2007.

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.

Trying to find the HTML errors in a complex layout on a page can get very frustrating (especially when it repeats elements generated by backend scripts). Scott Johnson had one such instance, so he wrote a little script to help with it.

I wasn't planning on blogging much today (or, honestly, this week) since we're making good progress on Ookles but our designer just had to deal with the situation where one of our developers clobbered our page footer w/ a comment gone astray and she wasted quite a bit of time analyzing the problem. Which, naturally, turned out to be nothing more than an unbalanced set of div tags.

And since that's more often than not the problem these days with CSS bugs - at least for us - I whipped up a drop dead dumb div tag counter which seems to work but I suspect isn't perfect since its about as naive as you can get.

He has the source of the script included in the post as well as two examples of using it with msn.com and news.com. Other suggestions of tools to help with these problems are listed in the comments - the View Rendered Source Firefox extension, and the HTML Validator for Firefox.

DevShed has the second part of their "Building a PHP5 Form Processor" series posted today - Coding the Form Validator Module. It looks at how to construct a set of functions that will check the data inputted to ensure it exists and correct/valid.

In this second part of a three-part series, we take up the topic of server-side validation. By the time you finish this article, you'll have the general guidelines for how to build a form validating class. You'll use some PHP built-in introspection functions, along with regular expressions, to assist you in building this class.

They create several functions, including validateEmpty, validateInteger, validateNumber, validateRange, and validateEmail. Each one (obviously) serves their own purpose, and some are more complex that others (validating an integer versus a valid email address), but they walk you through each, showing you plenty of code and explainations along the way...