symfony: PHP doesn't have to be crap

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

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…

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

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

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

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

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

Admin Generator

Debugging Tools

Plugins
Forum
Blog
(Simple) CMS
User Management
Atom/RSS Feed mangling

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

Putting it into practice

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

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

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

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

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

We’re not afraid – we embrace it!

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

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

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

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symfony: PHP doesn't have to be crap

by Michael Nolan on Nov 18, 2007

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symfony: PHP doesn’t have to be crap — Presentation Transcript