symfony: PHP doesn't have to be crap

Slide 1: symfony: PHP doesn’t have to be crap… …and how we used it to bring Web 2.0 to Edge Hill University Michael Nolan www.michaelnolan.co.uk blogs.edgehill.ac.uk/webservices

Slide 2: Coming up… • Edge Hill University and Me • Frameworks are the future • PHP Pros and Cons • symfony • How we’re using it • Some time for questions – maybe about 25 minutes…

Slide 3: Edge Hill University • Established 1885 • University status in 2006 • 8160 full time students • Centrally located… in Ormskirk! • Web is important

Slide 4: Edge Hill University & Me • Small centralised team • Develop, Content, Design, Manage • Web Applications Project Manager • At Edge Hill for ~1 year

Slide 5: Why use a framework? • Work around differences in environments • Write to defined coding standards • Templating • More maintainable code • Don’t reinvent the wheel

Slide 6: PHP Pros and Cons Good Bad • • Cheap hosting Bad reputation • • Developers for hire Spaghetti code • • Stable Amateurish • • Libraries Inconsistent syntax • • Support Reinventing the wheel • Documentation

Slide 7: Introducing symfony • PHP 5 only • Excellent documentation • XSS • MVC • Routing • ORM – Propel or Doctrine • i18n / l10n

Slide 8: Admin Generator

Slide 9: Admin Generator

Slide 10: Debugging Tools

Slide 11: Plugins • Forum • Blog • (Simple) CMS • User Management • Atom/RSS Feed mangling

Slide 12: Key Advantages • Write less code • More time for business rules • Documentation • symfony 1.0 maintained for a long time

Slide 13: Putting it into practice

Slide 14: Edge Hill University 2.0 • Word of mouth – user reviews • More collaborative tools – everyone can have their say • What is a trusted source? • Informal communications

Slide 15: Trends • 3,344 members in Edge Hill Facebook Network • Only 25% of students use our email accounts • No sense of privacy or protection of identity

Slide 16: “Everything you can do I can do better” Everything you provide I can (usually!) get for free

Slide 17: “100MB inbox?! I can get twenty times that for free… …and it always works!”

Slide 18: Edge Hill University is in the middle of nowhere, has p*ss poor student nightlife and is full of arrogant d*ckheads

Slide 19: We’re not afraid – we embrace it!

Slide 20: Let the students do the talking • Open up areas for student discussion • Aggregate content from across the University • Provide feeds for use elsewhere • Allow students the choice to use our services or their own

Slide 23: Lessons • SSO is a real PITA • Unit and functional tests don’t get written if you don’t do them first • Bugs happen – get over it • Trust the students; they usually do the right thing

Slide 24: Find out more about symfony www.symfony-project.com • Complete book released under GFDL • Forum – helpful community • Wiki – plugins, user documentation, translations Revamp coming soon, apparently

Slide 25: exit;