We wanted to give a big thank you to Jon Lebensold for the great work he is doing with Zendcasts. He is really helping the Zend Framework community with some of the best Zend Framework webcasts out there and we are very excited to be sponsoring Zendcasts for our very first episode on the topic of Doctrine Relations and Data Fixtures. Exciting stuff baby!

Check it out at zendcasts.com

We are offering a special promotion of 10% off using the coupon code “zc” on any hosting product to celebrate this occasion.

We are continually trying to improve our products and beginning this week a dedicated IP will be included with all VPS 100 accounts. If you are an existing VPS 100 customer you may request a dedicated IP at no additional cost by opening a support ticket. Keep in mind that your domain will have to be updated to point to the new IP address. This is really easy if you are already using our DNS servers.

Additional IPs for your VPS may still be purchased at $2 p/mo, as long as you provide a valid justification.

About the VPS 100

The VPS 100 is our entry level VPS offering 10GB Disk space, unlimited domains, 100GB data transfer, 256mb RAM burstable to 512MB. For $20 a month it is one of the best VPS offerings on the market fine tuned for running PHP frameworks & applications. It also includes DNS and Email service hosted in our servers outside your VPS so all the resources are used for your website hosting. For more information visit servergrove.com/vps

As some of you might have already noticed we updated our website last Friday. We hope you like the new design, while content heavy, it also contains a lot more information. We also streamlined our shared hosting product lines, more resources and more hosted sites. It continues to be a great product for a fair price with the support you have come to expect from us. Those of you who are already clients and wish to switch to a new product may do so at any time in our client area.

We also narrowed our service offerings to what we do best, which is PHP, Zend framework and symfony framework support. We have decided not to jump on the Django/Rails bandwagon and focus on the community and technologies love to work with. Supporting a framework we don’t believe in, or don’t like to work with is a true pain in the neck, and we don’t want to do it if we are not able to offer top-notch support for it. We believe that if we focus on what we do best and do it better than anyone else we will be a better hosting company.

As always, we are listening, honest feedback is always welcome.

OK, we know that 100 downloads in 3 days is not earth shattering, and there is still a long way to to reach Firefox download levels, but at least we did not bring down Graffletopia’s webserver and they thank us for that (I think).

We are glad to know it helped some people out there. Keep suggestions coming, I’ll update the template as soon as I have enough. In case you are a OmniGraffle user and have not seen it: http://graffletopia.com/stencils/485

Write an article or a tutorial about symfony, zend framework, php, wordpress or and other technology offered and supported by ServerGrove and we will pay up to $200 for accepted articles. To get involved read our guidelines and pitch your idea. If you have an idea for an article you think should appear in our blog, submit it to the comments area, perhaps someone will pick it up.

We are now open for questions on our brand spanking new discussion forums at http://www.servergrove.com/forum/

Some of you have asked for a screencast. Here it is. Send us feedback and feature requests, we are interested to know what you think.

We have two big symfony related announcements to make today!

1) We have four new shared hosting environments configured and performance tuned exclusively for running symfony applications. Cheaper and better, view plan details here.

2) We also launched Maestro, an exclusive extension to our control panel to facilitate deployment, debugging and management of symfony applications on shared hosting accounts.

What is Maestro?

Maestro is an extension to our hosting control panel that will allow our shared hosting users to easily deploy and manage multiple symfony applications. Some of its key features are:

• Install, configure and deploy your project with our Apache Web Servers easily and quickly.
• Manage the Apache configuration changes that need your Symfony-based sites, including the document root, .htaccess and mod_rewrite configuration.
• Includes an Ajax based log viewer so you can monitor symfony generated logs and PHP error log all from your browser.
• Run symfony commands like clear cache and fix permissions from your browser.
• Enhanced shared hosting security by running each website under its own user, preventing other users in shared server to access your files, cache and session data.  Additionally since your site runs with your FTP user, there are no permissions conflicts between the files you upload using FTP and the files generated by your site.

How do I use Maestro to setup my symfony project?

1. Upload your symfony project directory using your favorite FTP client

File Structure

2. Configure your symfony project to use the server-based symfony installation

<?php
require_once '/usr/local/php/symfony12/lib/autoload/sfCoreAutoload.class.php';
sfCoreAutoload::register();

class ProjectConfiguration extends sfProjectConfiguration
{
public function setup()
{
// for compatibility / remove and enable only the plugins you want
$this->enableAllPluginsExcept(array('sfDoctrinePlugin', 'sfCompat10Plugin'));
}}

3. Launch Maestro, click on the “Setup Web Server” button, and hit OK

Steps to launch a symfony application

4. Open your site in the browser, that’s it!

View your site using the preview link or your URL

Features in detail

• Manage symfony projects Maestro lets you manage all your symfony projects within each domain. When you launch Maestro, after selecting the domain in the control panel, you get the list of projects under the directory symfony_projects. It shows the symfony version, and URL/web root if it is active. You can have multiple projects and activate them as needed.

Select applications you want to manage from the projects list

• Know everything about your project Maestro features a check list of things that need to be configured in order for your project to run successfully. Checks permissions, paths and configurations and suggests fixes to get your application running painlessly.

Know everything about your project at a glance

• Run commands from your browser
  

  symfony tools

• Ajax-based log viewer Maestro provides a log viewer so you can monitor log messages generated by your symfony application. You can also view the PHP error log.

Ajax based log viewer

• Run symfony tasks from your browser Maestro lets you run symfony tasks like “clear cache” and “fix permissions” and view the output right from your browser, no need to get a SSH account and login, change directories, etc.  Additionally, fix-permissions is done a bit differently: Key files and directories are set to 700 so only your user can access them, providing extra security for cache and log files.

ajax based clear cache

• Easy Web Server Setup How many times you uploaded your project to a web host and had to fight countless hours to get your site running? Fight no more! Maestro manages all Apache configuration for you, including .htaccess and mod_rewrite. Just go to “Setup Web Server” and hit OK. The rest is done for you.

Configure your webserver from your browser

• Enhanced security Symfony developers often discussed about the drawbacks and security concerns regarding hosting symfony application in shared hosting servers. We listened.At ServerGrove, your site runs under your userid, not the Apache user. This means that all files generated by your site will be owned by you. Other users in the server are not going to be able to access them. Your cache and log files are safe. Additionally, if you run “fix-permissions” from Maestro, we set the cache, log and web/uploads permissions to 700 instead of 777 where every user in the server can access them, providing extra security. That’s not all! Every domain has its own sessions directory where all PHP session files are placed and owned by your user. Traditionally, PHP uses a centralized directory for session storage, on shared hosting this is not a very good idea. We still recommend our customers who are very concerned about security to purchase a VPS hosting account where you don’t share Apache or the file system with other hosting customers.
  
• Save all your session files in your personal directory. When we configure your domain, PHP is configured to save all session files in your personal directory and since your site runs with your userid, the session files are not readable by other users.
  
  
• No more file permissions conflicts Since your site runs using the same user as your FTP account, you won’t have any more conflicts of permissions between files uploaded through FTP and those created by your site.

Learn more about our hosting products preconfigured to run your symfony applications here

As promised a few weeks ago, we are releasing to the public a Symfony plugin that let’s your Symfony based applications interact with Jabber accounts. This means that your application can communicate with IM users of Google Talk and other Jabber (XMPP based) servers.

The possibilities are endless, here are just a few ideas:

• send and receive messages
• monitor contact online status
• execute server/application side operations controlled by IM users

The plugin offers:

• a daemon that is in charge of keeping the “bot” like user online, receives and sends messages, changes online status.
• a set of CLI tasks to send messages, and change status
• a set of API methods to use from your existing applications
• a set of callbacks that are executed from events within the daemon (ie. calls a method in your application when a message is received)

We are using this plugin in some of our applications. For example, our Live Chat system keeps track of the operators availability by monitoring the IM users online status. It also notifies the operators of incoming chats by sending messages to the IM accounts. By using this method, we are not require to use any special clients or open special websites to signup to our Live Chat system.

We are also developing other exciting applications that will interface with IM using this plugin, so stay tuned for future announcements!

This is our way of giving back to the Symfony community and we hope new and cool applications get created. If you do, we want to hear from you!

You can find the full documentation for the plugin at the plugin official home page.

If you have suggestions, improvements or any comments regarding this plugin, please let us know!