“Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.”

from Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists by Derek Powazek:

The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work, and it’s poisoning the web. I’m going to tell you about the problems, and then tell you the one true way to generate traffic on the web, based on my own 14 years of hits and misses.

This is a great post, which I discovered through daringfireball. It’s worth a read, either if you manage a website and have wondered about what “SEO” can (or in this case, can’t) do for you, or if you are a web developer and you get clients asking how they can improve their search visibility.

6 Icon Packs You Will Actually Use.

I just received a review copy of a new book published by Packt Publishing called “Symfony 1.3 Web Application Development“, available online. The book is written by Tim Bowler and Wojciech Bancer over at the UK based Agile Labs. It’s amazing that a book has been published for this new version of symfony even before the 1.3.0ALPHA1 was released.

The book covers all of the basics, including the forms framework and the admin generator. The code examples use Propel rather than Doctrine. I’m looking forward to seeing how in depth they go into the forms framework; to me it seems to be the most confusing aspect about symfony overall.

500 | Internal Server Error | Doctrine_Validator_Exception
 1 field had validation error:
 * 1 validator failed on file (type)

The short solution: when using a doctrine form class and $form->save(), set the path option in your sfValidatorFile validator and do not attempt to save/set the file column yourself. If you are curious why this is, continue reading.

What was particularly strange about this error is that the “file” column in my model was defined as a string, and I was certain I was setting this column by hand to the file name (a string) of the uploaded file. Hmm… this shouldn’t trigger an error, should it? This following is what did not work. I used the documentation for sfValidatorFile() found in the symfony Forms book.

// my form
class ArtistForm extends BaseArtistForm
{
  public function configure()
  {
    $this->widgetSchema['file'] = new sfWidgetFormInputFile();
    $this->validatorSchema['file'] = new sfValidatorFile(array(
      'required' => false, 'mime_types' => 'web_images'
    ));
  }
}
 
// my action ***did not work***
public function executeForm(sfWebRequest $request)
  {
    $this->form = new ArtistForm();
    if ($request->isMethod('post')) {
      $this->form->bind($request->getParameter('artist'), $request->getFiles('artist'));
      if ($this->form->isValid())
      {
        $file = $this->form->getValue('file');
        if ($file) {
          $filename = sha1($file->getOriginalName());
          $extension = $file->getExtension($file->getOriginalExtension());
          $file->save(sfConfig::get('sf_upload_dir').'/'.$filename.$extension);          
          $this->form->getObject()->setFile($filename.$extension);
        }
 
        $this->form->save();
      }
    }    
  }

Anytime I’d try to upload a file, I’d get the dreaded “Doctrine_Validator_Exception”, “validator failed on file (type)” message. After some serious googling, I came up with a few links (listed at the bottom of this post) that eventually led me to the solution. The issues boils down to this:

• When using the sfValidatorFile widget in your form, retrieving that value from your form returns an sfValidatedFile object
• Doctrine forms will automatically try to process and save uploaded files, so you do not need to do this manually in your action if you call $form->save() and your form contains an instance of sfValidatorFile
• The automatic save mechanism in your doctrine form will fail if you do not define a path in your sfValidatorFile validator. This is because if no path is defined in your validator, the validator returns an instance of sfValidatedFile and calling $form->save() will result in trying to update your doctrine object with this sfValidatorFile instance, resulting in an error.
• If a path is defined in your sfValidatorFile validator, the bound form value for your file input field is set to the full path to saved file rather than an sfValidatedFile instance, allowing your doctrine object to be saved.

Now, with a deeper understanding of how this is all put together, we can update our action:

// doctrine form class
class ArtistForm extends BaseArtistForm
{
  public function configure()
  {
    $this->widgetSchema['photo'] = new sfWidgetFormInputFile();
    $this->validatorSchema['photo'] = new sfValidatorFile(array(
      'required' => false, 'mime_types' => 'web_images',
      'path' => sfConfig::get('sf_upload_dir')
    ));
  }
}
 
// the action
  public function executeForm(sfWebRequest $request)
  {
    $this->form = new ArtistForm();
    if ($request->isMethod('post')) {
      $this->form->bind($request->getParameter('artist'), $request->getFiles('artist'));
      if ($this->form->isValid())
      {
        $this->form->save();
      }
    }    
  }

More about this issue in the forums and mailing list:

• http://forum.symfony-project.org/index.php/m/74831/
• http://groups.google.com/group/symfony-users/browse_thread/thread/668a44a52a775938/3d55c8bb40290dbe?show_docid=3d55c8bb40290dbe

Zawinski didn’t do many unit tests. They “sound great in principle. Given a leisurely development pace, that’s certainly the way to go. But when you’re looking at, ‘We’ve got to go from zero to done in six weeks,’ well, I can’t do that unless I cut something out. And what I’m going to cut out is the stuff that’s not absolutely critical. And unit tests are not critical. If there’s no unit test the customer isn’t going to complain about that.”

via The Duct Tape Programmer – Joel on Software.

My first attempt was to use PECL to install APC, but that didn’t work, so I had to rely on these instructions. They worked perfectly with my setup: OS X 10.5.8, entropy PHP Version 5.2.9 (release 7) running x86_64.

Apple – Support – Discussions – Entropy php5 with GD support and APC ….

Haven’t tried this but hope to, soon!

1. Checkout code from SVN into your ~/Sites folder. From the command line do:

svn co [path to repository] ~/Sites/[projectname] --username [username]

After the checkout, go into your new [projectname] directory and do a fix permissions:

./symfony fix-perms

2. Create a new virtual host in apache. You can skip this step but I find it makes things easier. My entry in my apache .conf file (on my mac its located at /etc/apache2/users/[username].conf where [username] is the username on my mac) looks like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
	ServerName [projectname].local
	DocumentRoot /Users/[myusername]/Sites/[projectname]/web
</VirtualHost>

I also have add this new domain to my local hosts file at /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1   [projectname].local

then i restart my webserver with a “sudo apachectl graceful”.

3. set up your local database. On my mac I use Sequel Pro to create the database. I run a..

./symfony propel-build-all

..to regenerate the sql and base model classes. Often I don’t like to commit auto-generated code to svn but rather just the source files from which the new code is generated (you can read the side bar “Best Practice: Checkin all the canonical stuff, and nothing else” with one view on this at http://www.ericsink.com/scm/scm_repositories.html).

Once that is done, normally I would insert the db schema into my new database, like this:

mysql -u root [dbname] < data/sql/lib.model.schema.sql

… but sometimes I want to use a lot of the same basic data from before, so I insert database dump that has actual content:

mysql -u root [dbname] < data/sql/latest.sql

4. configure the symfony project to use your new db. You’ll have to copy the config/databases.yml-dist to database.yml and add your own settings there. The databases.yml file is ignored in our repository, so that way the devs can keep different local configuration settings for our dev environment without having to create lots of different symfony environments (usually I keep them to just dev, stage, production) in the project.

5. load up http://[projectname].local/frontend_dev.php to see if things are working!

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.http-build-query.php