How to get into Web Development with NO degree and NO debt. I woke up this morning listening to MPR reporting on 800 newly unemployed workers from the now former Ford Ranger Plant. In that report a couple lamented the end of a time when someone could get a good job, work hard, and achieve the [...]

It is not well documented how to use the format option for sfWidgetFormJQueryDate in the sfFormExtrasPlugin for Symfony 1.4. However, once I learned about sfWidgetFormJQueryDate’s date_widget option it was pretty easy.  Just create a new date widget and use the format option there. The example below needs to be in your form’s configure method and [...]

The hardest part of interactive projects is not the coding or ideation, its working efficiently as a collaborative team. There are ways to spend a ton of hours & money on your infrastructure, and then invest hours of maintenance every month, all on tools that don’t directly make you money.

ApostropheNow is the easiest to use OS content management system with an outstanding ROI, and it’s build on the outstanding Symfony framework.

1. Requests for Proposals pay for themselves The RFP document will be how the development team provides an estimate on both the work described in the document and the risk you represent as a client. Better RFP documents will result in a higher response rate, more accurate estimates, less time in meetings talking about the [...]

Symfony 1.3 Web Application Development is the latest book on the symfony PHP web framework and the first not written by the authors of the framework. This allows the authors to adopt a more pragmatic style that favors 3rd party plugins.  This is a good thing because IMHO the most important thing about a framework [...]

I was having some trouble finding documentation on how to i18n generated CRUD’s, so once I figured (most) of it out I thought I’d share it The Example Application Since I have to create a feature in my one of my current work projects to store random bits of content, like privacy policies and such, [...]

Symfony Plugin Review: sfEasyGMapPlugin The sfEasyGmapPlugin seeks to encapsulate much many of the features in the Google Maps API and make them easily available in the Symfony PHP 5 Framework.

Learning Zend Framework and getting a repetitive stress injury doing it Edit: please see Matthew Weier O’Phinney’s (the current project lead for Zend Framework) response in the comments, there are some exciting things comming for ZF My friends & colleagues have used Zend Framework (ZF) for a while, and I do my best to avoid it [...]

So I was browsing through craigslist.com, looking for some deals.  I happened across a post for some estate sales in the garage sale section.  And this site was listed for more information. Turns out there are companies that do a lot of estate sales, which are pretty much well organized garage sales for the recently [...]

http://zoomii.com This is a really interesting take on a online bookstore that is really optimized for free form exploration with a very intuitive interface for those accoustomed to a mouse with a scroll wheel. Interesting User Interface, and it brings up some thought provoking usability questions. This type of experimentation is going to lead to [...]

I don’t know why I’m still surprised by the Internet, but there’s a guy who ranks loan calculators. Fortunately he liked webdigs.com‘s mortgage calculator: http://superloancalculators.com/?p=12 A new version of the mortgage calculator will be out soon, maybe we’ll break 9.

Many times using scripts I find on the Internet turns into kind of a hassle. They are usually unfinished side projects, or are kind of bloated and slow. TableKit is not one of those scripts, it’s fast & easy to implement. Development time was low, and the designers didn’t complain too much about working with [...]

This last week has been really got me feeling pretty positive about the future of the Symfony PHP framework. Last Thursday Erica Guay (erica D0T guay AT Sapphire.com) called me and is the first recruiter to ask me if I knew the Symfony framework. She’s got a pretty awesome opportunity near Boston, MA to fill [...]

Yahoo Pipes allows anyone to create their own mashup in a method very similar to creating a flowchart. After messing around just a little I was able to create 2 pretty cool little mashups: The first one geocodes garage sale locations and puts them on a map.  Not very well, but it was really easy [...]

This is a narrative of my experience with the Symfony PHP 5 framework over the last 10 months. The short story is that I’m a fan, but it’s not perfect.

I should be receiving a “PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects” from PACKT publishing in the mail sometime soon, once I get it I’ll try to have a review up in a couple of weeks. If you are interested check out the full book description at PACKT publishing I’m pretty excited about it, I was planning [...]

So I was taking my morning stroll through popUrls when I came across two articles. One about CrazyEgg, a really cool tool for gathering usability statistics, and the other this really random, unconventional, whimsical, unprofessional, unattractive, outdated, not entirely original, and really really effective website for some hippie named Miranda July. (FYI – I call [...]

So last Thursday the majority of the MoCo Web Development team and I attended the MySQL Meetup featuring Jay Pipes of MySQL. It was hosted at Metro State U. in Minneapolis, MN the facility was top notch (read: they had pie and coffee Jay Pipes is an excellent speaker whose enthusiasm about MySQL is contagious. [...]