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.
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:
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
Select applications you want to manage from the projects list
Know everything about your project at a glance
symfony tools
Ajax based log viewer
ajax based clear cache
Configure your webserver from your browser
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:
The plugin offers:
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!
A very nice collection of php tutorials and tools showed up this morning. It was worth sharing.
Swift is a powerful PHP library to send email messages, much better than using the mail() native function. It offers a very nice set of features, some of these are:
It is very popuplar among symfony users.
At ServerGrove we have added this library to all our servers, so now you can use it without having to upload it to the server. Here are the steps to use it:
The library is located in /usr/local/php/Swift and it will kept up to date with new releases.
<?php
require_once "Swift/lib/Swift.php";
require_once "Swift/lib/Swift/Connection/NativeMail.php";
$swift = new Swift(new Swift_Connection_NativeMail("-fyou@example.com"));
if ($swift->send($message, "recipient@example.com", "you@example.com"))
{
echo "Message sent";
}
else
{
echo "Message failed to send";
}
?>
For more information check out the Swift documentation which is pretty good.
The long anticipated RSpec book by David Chelimsky is out, well sort of… It is available as a PDF Beta version. Still, I am excited to finally have access to it. I saw a presentation by David at Rails Summit Latin America, and if his talk is any indication of the quality of the book, it should be well worth the read. His introduction to TDD (Test Driven Development) and BDD (Behavior Driven Development) and discussion of related tools in his talk at Rails Summit was first rate, and I’m looking forward to reading more about the subject in greater detail and depth.
The RSpec Book: http://www.pragprog.com/titles/achbd/the-rspec-book
In this post we will explain how we were able to use Symfony templates in WordPress, allowing us to avoid duplication of files and code, and still carry the same look and feel of our main website (which runs in Symfony) into our Blog.
When making changes in the templates of our symfony-based site, those changes are immediately available in the Blog which runs on WordPress without having to copy code or files.
In our case, we wanted to have the top section of our website (header and top navigation) and the footer in both the corporate website and Blog.
The way we had built our site proved to be very useful and time saving, this is how we defined it in symfony:
include_partial('global/topnav');
echo $sf_content;
include_partial('global/footer');
WordPress themes include several files that need to be customized to change the way it looks by default. These files can be modified by going into “Appearance” and “Editor”.
We did not use the main layout.php template from Symfony, because we moved the common elements of the HTML into the partials. So on WordPress we only modified header.php and footer.php
In header.php we included the _topnav.php file from symfony. So after the <body> tag we inserted the following line:
<?php include('/path_to_symfony_project/apps/site/templates/_topnav.php'); ?>
This inserts the top area (including the navigation) of our site into every page and post of the Blog. if you have an external CSS in your main site, which you probably do, you need to make sure to add it to the header.php in WordPress.
Then to properly add the footer section of the site to the Blog, we edited footer.php and inserted the following line before the </body> tag
<?php include( '/path_to_symfony_project/apps/site/templates/_footer.php' ); ?>
The same could be done in the inverse way. If you have your main elements of your site design in WordPress, you could include those in the Symfony templates.
If you have any other ideas on how to accomplish this, or other tips on Symfony and WordPress integration, leave a comment, we would love to hear form you.
During the creation of a web application, on many occasions it is necessary to do something that requires the use of an external library.
If you happen to be building your web application using symfony, it is possible to use parts of the Zend Framework (and other frameworks and libraries) independently. This enables a whole new world of features with no preset limits.
At ServerGrove we use symfony for many of our projects, and also use Zend Framework since it provides many great components. This is why, we are always up to date on both frameworks and you will get excellent technical support when hosting your framework based sites with us.
So, as an example, you can use Zend_Mail to send emails from symfony. Some other components that are very useful in the symfony world are:
- Zend_Currency
- Zend_Mime
- Zend_Ldap
- Zend_Http
- Zend_OpenId
- Zend_Pdf
And the list goes on.
But going back to the Zend_Mail example, first, we need to tell symfony where to find the Zend Framework library.
All our servers here at ServerGrove come with not only symfony pre-installed but also we have all latests Zend Framework releases. It will be located at /usr/local/php/Zend. This will always be the latest stable version. If you need to use a specific version of the framework (to avoid possible future compatibility issues) you can also link to a specific version, for example /usr/local/php/ZendFramework-1.7.0/library
So, we need to modify the file config/ProjectConfiguration.class.php so we can use the autoloader provided by ZF, it should look like this:
// config/ProjectConfiguration.class.php
class ProjectConfiguration extends sfProjectConfiguration
{
static protected $zendLoaded = false;
static public function registerZend()
{
if (self::$zendLoaded)
{
return;
}
$zflib = '/usr/local/php/Zend';
set_include_path($zflib.PATH_SEPARATOR.get_include_path());
require_once $zflib.'/Loader.php';
Zend_Loader::registerAutoload();
self::$zendLoaded = true;
}
// ...
}
Then when we need to send the email, usually in an action, this is what we do:
ProjectConfigation::registerZend();
$mail = new Zend_Mail();
$mail->setBodyText('Message body');
$mail->setFrom('me@example.com', 'My name');
$mail->addTo($recipientEmail);
$mail->setSubject('Subject');
$mail->send();
That’s it. Could not be simpler! As we said, this opens many possibilites by using external libraries and avoids reinventing the wheel. By using the set of libraries and frameworks we provide on ServerGrove, it has never been easier to develop and run powerful and professional websites.
It is not possible to recover a lost Mysql password since they are encrypted. But it can always be changed or reset.
To change the root Mysql password, follow these steps (they are primarily listed to use in our VPS servers but they may be used in others as well):
1) Stop mysql by executing as root in the command line: service mysql stop
2) Start mysql without the privileges system, execute: mysqld_safe –skip-grant-tables &
3) Open the mysql console by executing: mysql
4) Run the following queries (replace the root password with your desired password)
UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD(‘yourpassword’) WHERE User=’root’;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
5) exit the mysql console and stop mysql: service mysql stop
6) Start mysql by executing: service mysql start
Now the new password is in place.
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