Live demo

Link: http://bit.ly/An_live_demo
Username: admin
Password: demo
* login info is prepopulated in the login form so you can just press the login button
** The database and media are  reset at the top each hour.

Why you care

• The Apostrophe CMS is easier to use, and easier to write templates for than WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla.
• It’s well integrated into the enterprise ready Symfony framework.
• Apostrophe still allows developers to use almost all the features built into Symfony as well as the Zend Framework.
• Expensive features are baked in like:
  • Content version control
  • Multiple language support or Internationalization
  • Media library for images, videos, & PDFs
  • User management with permissions and groups
• It’s open source and easy to customize so it’s ROI is outstanding

How is this going to make me money?

Apostrophe is the easiest to use content management system (CMS) available to the open source community. An easy CMS means that content managers are more likely to use it, which means consumers will get better information and be more likely to follow the sites profit funnel.

For web solutions providers Apostrophe is a CMS solution that bypasses the commodity hell of WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla by providing a unique value differentiation. Apostrophe also has the advantage of being built on an enterprise grade web framework used by sites like Delicious, Dailymotion, Yahoo! Answers, and Yahoo! Bookmarks. Symfony provides a consistent structure that encourages collaboration, and the large community of developers already familiar with Symfony mean help is available.

So what makes Apostrophe so special?

Contextual content management is what. Traditional content management systems have a backend admin interface that users log into to maintain the site. The editing interface has nothing to do with the interface the content will be viewed on. Admin interfaces are also full of features that don’t make a lot of sense to someone not working with web technology every day. Contextual content management mitigates these issues by allowing content to be edited in the same place the content is consumed.  To manage menus content editors simply drag and drop menu items where they need to go.  Content editors can add and edit content in multiple formats: rich text with a WYSIWYG, plain text, RSS feed, image, slideshow, button, video, pdf, or raw html. These content formats are called slots and are highly configurable in the templates during development. Apostrophe allows developers to control where slots are available as well as modify there behavior. Developers can add options for users to choose from, for example the dev team can specify image sizes of small, medium, and large that content editors can choose from when they add an image slot. Media files are managed through a built in media repository with categories, tagging, filtering by type, and text search. A unique feature of all the Apostrophe admin interfaces is that they use the same stylesheet as the rest of the site so they are visually integrated with the rest of the site.

What if someone makes a mistake?

Apostrophe comes with content version control baked into contextual editing interface. At the top of each content area, Area is Apostrophe jargon, is a History button. Click that and a dialog comes up showing who did what, and when, as well as allowing content editors to click on a revision to quickly review it. To revert to that version simply click the new “Save As Current Revision”.  I’ve build content version control, and the user interface has been a problem for me, I never had the budget to do one right, but Apostrophe nails it for free.

How are multiple languages supported?

Apostrophe uses Symfony’s Multi-Lingual architecture. To add or edit a translation a developer needs to add a language switcher to tell Symfony what language is being requested. Then the content editor can switch languages and make the translation just like if the site were a single language. A key benefit of contextual content management is that the translator can see how the size of the translation is effecting the page’s layout.

What about user management?

The very popular sfDoctrineGuardPlugin is utilized to provide user management features like: login, logout, a user CRUD, groups, and permissions. The sfDoctrineGuardPlugin is well tested, widely used and actively maintained. Apostrophe does a very nice job of integrating the plugin into the CMS and it automaticly adopts the design of the rest of the site.

What kind of problems can I expect?

Installation is a little complicated, an experienced Symfony developer will come in handy here. Apostrophe suggests using svnforeigncopy to clone their sandbox project, but I could never get it to work. I suspect that Git might be a better version control system for this application.

I had trouble with the server requirements, specifically missing Netpbm for image manipulation caused the media repository to hang in my WAMP setup. This could have been handled better, but Netpbm just had to be turned off.  At the suggestion of the Apostrophe authors I got a $20/mo VPS from ServerGrove and all my (server) problems went away.

Having the admin interface integrated into the frontend means that it’s sometimes in the way. This is easily solved by adjusting the CSS to position the admin buttons.

Another issue with having the admin interfaces embedded in the page is the requirement for additional wrapping <div> tags. This will look like divitis, and make your CSS rules more complicated.

I ran into a couple bugs that I attribute to the CMS being fairly new. I’ve noticed the that the project is updated fairly frequently so I expect the stability to increase quickly.

Lastly, I’m a little concerned that my clients are going to ask me for ways to edit meta tags, like title, description, & keywords. I’ve seen no easy way of accomplishing this, however it seems like a easy feature so I suspect it to be added in the near future. If a client needs it I’m sure I could make this happen without too much effort.

So what do I do when I run into a problem?

The PunkAve crew that authored Apostrophe are very helpful on the Google Group. I usually got responses in under an hour. Before asking for help make sure to go through the Manual, Wiki, Trac bug list, and search the existing Google Group messages.

Closing thoughts.

Apostrophe is my new favorite CMS, well actually it’s the only CMS I would choose to use. I really do not enjoy working with WordPress & Drupal, and Apostrophe is an outstanding alternative. I’m very excited about the new Apostrophe plugins for a blog and a form builder. I’m actually looking for excuses to use them, maybe robertspeer.com is due for a rebuild. A little bird told me about some exciting developments in the Apostrophe world, follow @apostrophenow to be the first to know.

About the author:

Hello, I’m Robert Speer a web professional experienced in leading the development of large web applications. Currently I’m working on a property marketing web application that I plan on integrating Apostrophe into. I’m also accepting project work to fund my bootstrapping efforts, contact me for more information.

My Links:

• http://www.linkedin.com/in/roberthspeer
• http://www.twitter.com/robert_speer
• http://www.google.com/profiles/rhspeer

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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 RFP, and less padding to account for risk.

The customer acquisition process is the most expensive operation for a custom development shop. Every lead that comes in the door represents a mix of opportunity, risk, and expense that development teams work very hard to mitigate. The good news is that you are the one with the money to spend, but to get the most for your money, you need to maximize your vendors’ opportunity and minimize their risk and expense.

Start your RFP with the the project working name, who to contact with questions, and how and where to submit the RFP to. Next, write a short, high-level project summary that includes what you want to do and how you will define success. Follow the project summary with a project timeline with a deadline for submitting proposals, a start time, and when you need the project completed. If you have any specific technical requirements, include them. If parts of the project are already completed or will be sourced to other vendors, make that clear as well.

Make sure each page of the RFP has a page number; this will save you time when going over the document in phone calls. Section headings also help to quickly steer conversations to the relevant portion of the document.

Focus the RFP on what needs to be done and avoid how it is going to get done. Sometime there is a temptation to get into details, but a decent web development team will quickly figure that out on their own. There are exceptions, but focusing on what to do and not how to do it is a good rule of thumb.

Pro Tip: A good RFP document can replace about half of the scope of work document your development team will write, which translates to even more cost savings for you.

Updates:

• May 26 2010 – cleaned up markup, added some more tips for the wireframe section

Note: I originally published this post on another blog. It’s archived here because I think it’s useful, and I wanted to keep it updated with new tools and techniques. It is an original work created & owned by Robert Speer.

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 is it’s library of extensions.

The book also has a nice blend of information available in the already available symfony book, cookbook, and book length tutorials using the techniques that a actual development team would use.

Unfortunately this book was pushed out before symfony 1.3 was finished, and apparently before a sufficiently detail oriented proofer could go through the book.  Luckily the issues are primarily non-technical and mostly limited to the first few chapters and should not deter you from purchasing the book.

The most notable technical issue I have with the book is the use of a XML schema instead of a YAML one, this actually works fine, it’s just a non-standard way of doing it.  Also sometimes it feels like the authors did a search for 1.2 and replaced it with 1.3, again this is not that big a deal because the differences between the versions are mostly not relevant to beginner or intermediate symfony developers.

So would I recommend this book?  Yes, especially if PAKT comes out with a second revision with better editing.  This book provides valuable real world examples and accessible detail that eases the difficult learning curve of symfony development.

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, in multiple languages. I thought I’d double dip and use that for this example.  I’m calling the feature content blocks.  It will have a backend CRUD that will facilitate translations.  The UI I needed was to have the default language show up as well as one of the many languages this information would be translated into.  My app has the possibility of having more than 20 language options so putting them all in the CRUD at once was unreasonable.

The example to the left shows what the CRUD looks like when French is set as the user’s culture.  If the default language is chosen a second language form does not show up.

On the frontend I’m just going to do a simple data pull for this example.  Both the frontend and the backend app will have very simple language switchers  to demonstrate how that works.
Now that I now how this works it’s actually pretty darn simple, however figuring it out took longer than I’d like.  Hopefully this tutorial will save you some time.

I’m going to skip the application setup, if you don’t know how to do that I used the same steps that are in the Doctrine version of the Jobeet tutorial.

Download the example app zip file here, includes Symfony 1.2.9

Doctrine schema.yml

The database schema.yml was by a little tricky at first.  I did not realize that Doctrine handles I18n tables so much differently from Propel.  With Propel I would have defined a second table named content_block_i18n and put the translated fields there.  For Doctrine they simply go in under the actAs and I18n.  This is less typing and I suspect more intuitive for those who don’t already know Propel.

Also remember to put columns: before your field definitions, and leave out the connection at the top of the file.  Timestammable adds the created_at & updated_at fields.  Also notice that the data types are different from Propel’s.

I think I’m going to like these changes, but they are different so be careful if you are used to Propel.

content_block:
actAs:
Timestampable: ~
I18n:
fields: [short_title, title, extract, content]
columns:
weight: integer
active: boolean
short_title: string(50)
title: string
extract: string
content: string(4000)

Once you’re done: create your database, edit databases.yml, build-all, and clear you cache.  Details are in the Jobeet tutoral in Day 3: The Data Model.

Adding embedI18n() to the form class a.k.a: where the magic happens

This part took some serious research, I was just sure all I had to do was edit something in the generator.yml, but that turned out not to be the case.

I finally found  embedI18n() in the Forms in Action book in the i18n chapter under Propel Objects Internationalization.  It does use the much maligned sfContext, and if you know a better way write a comment.

You’ll want to generate forms(php symfony doctrine:generate-forms) & then the contend block CRUD (php symfony doctrine:generate-admin backend ContentBlock), as well as turn I18n on in the backend settings.yml.

This is in: lib/form/content_blockForm.class in the example application.

/**
* content_block form.
*
* @package form
* @subpackage content_block
*/
class content_blockForm extends Basecontent_blockForm
{
/**
* Form configuration settings
*
* @author Robert H. Speer
*/
public function configure()
{
$this->embedI18n(array(sfConfig::get('sf_default_culture', 'en'),
$this->getCurrentCulture())
);
}


/**
* pulls the current culture from the user object
*
* @return string
* @author Robert H. Speer
*
* Notes:
* RHS 10/2/09 - sfContext::getInstance() violates MVC but I don't know a way
* around it ATM.
*/
public function getCurrentCulture()
{
$culture = sfContext::getInstance()->getUser()->getCulture();

if (strlen($culture)>0) { // return user selected language
return $culture;
}else{ // return default culture, or defaults to english
return sfConfig::get('sf_default_culture', 'en');
}
}

}

A simple language switcher component

I’ve included a very simple language switching component in the example application.  Assuming you know how to write a component, it’s not a big deal.

The actual language setter is in both apps (i know wet is bad) under language_switcher/actions/action.class.php & looks like this:

/**
* changes the users culture and redirects them back the their previous page
*
* @author Robert H. Speer
*/
public function executeLanguage() {
$this->getUser()->setCulture($this->getRequestParameter('culture'));

$url = $this->getRequest()->getReferer() != '' ? $this->getRequest()->getReferer() : '@homepage';
$this->redirect($url);
}

It’s going to take the user’s selected culture set that to the user object, and then redirect causing a refresh.

How to get at that translated content

This is the easy part, you actually don’t have to do anything special to grab content in the language set in the user object, just get the object and call the getter.

Grab the object(s) with something like this, but preferably in the model layer instead of apps/frontend/homepage/actions/action.class.php:

/**
* Executes index action
*
* @param sfRequest $request A request object
*/
public function executeIndex(sfWebRequest $request)
{
$this->block = Doctrine::getTable('content_block')->createQuery('a')->execute();
}

Then in your template you can access all the fields just like if they were in the same table (this is really cool):

/**
* Very simple homepage for demo purposes only
*
* @author Robert H. Speer
*/
foreach ($block as $key=>$row)
{
echo 'id: '.$row->getId().'<br>';
echo 'weight: '.$row->getWeight().'<br>';
echo 'short title: '.$row->getShortTitle().'<br>';
echo 'title: '.$row->getTitle().'<br>';
echo 'extract: '.$row->getExtract().'<br>';
echo 'content: '.$row->getContent().'<br>';
echo 'created at: '.$row->getCreatedAt().'<br>';
echo 'updated at: '.$row->getUpdatedAt().'<br>';
echo 'lang: '.$row->getLang().'<br>';
echo '<hr>';
}

If you get the example app going on your own machine add a few records with some translations, then change the language with the language drop down and it will just work automagicaly.  For your own apps remember to turn I18n on in your applications settings.yml.

Reference Links

• As always the Symfony’s sweet documentation
• Sandbox Web Solutions does a great job of explaining a different way to embed i18n forms in a generated CRUD

What I have not figured out yet

• I have got the file upload widget to show up in the Admin generator but I it does not work automagicaly, like I think it should, I think I’m going to have to write the file handler myself.
  • edit 10/04/09 10:42PM -> Stereo Interactive has a work around for this
• Getting at the embedded fields in the generator.yml is elusive as well.

I’ll be working on both of these problems as soon as I get back to work, so hopefully I’ll have an update soon.  If you figure it out first please write a comment.

Disclaimer:

By the time I was done writing this tutorial I was very ready to not be at my computer anymore, there are going to be some grammatical mistakes and maybe some code ones as well.  I through this together on WAMP, on my home desktop, so you may have to change the slashes on your path, and update your apache conf &/or your .htaccess file to get it to work.  The application I’ve uploaded does work, but it is just a demo so don’t trust it too much

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.

The Test:

I set up a very basic Symfony 1.2.9 project and installed the plugin.  Installation of the plugin was a breeze the command line install worked flawlesly. Which is very nice, and unexpected, as many plugins work better if you install them manually.

The sample module worked exactly as advertised, after I corrected my Google Maps API key.

Pretty soon I had an example module created and was inputting my own locations, geocoding addresses, re centering, and using some nice syntactic sugar like the centerAndZoomOnMarkers method that does exactly what it says it does.

The example module covers the basics, but I’d also encourage you to browse through the classes to get a sense of that this plugin will do.

My testing was fairly simplistic and I don’t have any experience with this app on a large application, however it would be my first choice if I had a project requiring mapping.

The Results:

The code is well done, object oriented, intuitive, & very easy to use.

My only criticism is that it could do with a little more content in it’s PHP docs, but that’s pretty minor.

I would strongly reccommend this plugin, and look forward to an excuse to use it, and I’d like to thank the authors for providing the community with such great code.

Thanks to:

• Fabrice Bernhard
• Laurent Bachelier
• Tom Haskins-Vaughan
• Vincent Guillon

The authors come mostly from Allomatch

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 and use the Symfony PHP framework.  Initially I was open to learning ZF, I was just curious why people liked it.  The more questions I asked, the more I realized there were no good answers other than standards for standards sake, and variations on the Sunk Cost Fallacy.  If pressed I was told that I had to give Zend Framework a chance because it is a younger framework than Symfony, (um no).  Some of the developers had even written a library to add on to Zend Framework to make it more usable, it contained features that were already in Symfony.  IMHO, writing code to help a framework catch up is an excellent reason to switch to another framework.

This last week I was finally forced to use ZF, my rebellious use of Symfony only served to annoy the other developers, and had the potential to increase maintenance costs.  It seemed like a reasonable request, and all those developers couldn’t be wrong could they?

Well yes they are.  I work with some great people whose feelings I don’t wish to hurt, but I would estimate that Zend Framework projects cost between 20 to 40 hours more for projects that run around ~400 hour plus. With agency rates what they are that could turn in to 6 or 7 thousand dollars of added costs. Assuming requirements for user authentication and backend CRUD’s.  These numbers will vary widely from project to project.

From a quick comparison of the Symfony Case Studies and the Zend Framework Case studies I would expect this efficiency gap to continue to increase.  A couple of Zend Framework‘s case study subjects have already failed: QEDWiki & PokerRoom.com, and anyone who’s been unfortunate enough to have to customize Magento likely regrets the experience.   Symfony’s case studies are large successful projects you may have heard of:  DailyMotion, Yahoo! Answers, Delicious, & Yahoo! Bookmarks.  To be fair I’ve seen some really nice Zend Framework apps, I’ve just seen more interesting and larger Symfony projects.

A Quick Comparison

To present as fair a comparison as possible I have rewritten the Zend Framework Quick Start as a Symfony app. I also used Symfony 1.2 with the Doctrine ORM, both of which I’ve not used before, as my projects have been in Symfony 1 or 1.1 and the Propel ORM so far.

I’ve formatted this more as a timeline of events rather than a tutorial, however the full Symfony app source is available HERE.  To drop it on your web server you will have to change the path to Symfony in config/ProjectConfiguration.class.php, I had it running through WAMP on my local machine.

This also serves to document how I wasted a perfectly wonderful summer morning, *sigh*.

I did change some things around, I used MySQL because I’m not familiar with sqLite and, I used reCaptcha instead of a captcha similar to the tutorials.  I think these add difficulty, and are fair changes.

1. 9:15am – 9:30am set up symfony app
2. 9:30am -9:38am skip a bunch of Zend configs and translating layout to sf
3. 9:40am – 9:43am generated controller & view, skipping autoloading in the bootstrap file
4. 9:43am – 10:06am set up database
   1. wrote schema.yml to define guestbook table
   1. setup database connection string:
      1. php symfony configure:database –name=doctrine –class=sfDoctrineDatabase “mysql:host=localhost;dbname=guestbook” username password
   1. 10:06am – 10:20am building model
      1. php symfony doctrine:build-model (Getters, Setters & Stuff or GSS)
      2. php symfony doctrine:build-sql   (generates the sql)
      3. php symfony doctrine:insert-sql  (inserts the sql into the db)
      4. skipping the build database script, symfony does that for us
5. 10:20am – 10:35am Listing out all guestbook entries in view  (got distracted with doctrine, I usually use propel)
6. 10:48 am Generating form classes
   1. configuring to remove created at from view
      1. unset( $this['created_at'], $this['updated_at'] );
7. random interruptions by wife….
8. 11 am writing view layer
9. 11:15am writing controller for saving
10. Setting up captcha
    1. installing form extra plugin
       1. php symfony plugin:install sfFormExtraPlugin
       2. I can’t type, kept putting the api keys in wrong , fancy reCaPTCHA complete (11:51am)
11. Double checked ZF Quick Start to make sure I did not forget anything
12. 11:54am done

Development Highlights:

Symfony:

• under 150 lines of me-written code, including html I C&P’d from the zend tutorial
  • this means much less fumble finger type mistakes
• ~2hrs 39 min to complete from httpd.conf setup to form submission.
  • with distractions, a mySQL db, and a reCaptcha
  • I’ve clearly spent more time complaining about Zend Framework than it would take to complete the mini app in Symfony
• The only config files I touched were
  • config/ProjectConfiguration.class.php to use Doctrine instead of propel auto-magically
  • config/doctrine/schema.yml to define the db tables
  • config databases.yml was set up from the command line so you be the judge on that one

Zend:

• Configuration done in:
  • Bootstrap file configuration
  • appliation.ini configuration
• the zf tutorial expects you to write around 515 lines of code to do the same thing as Symfony
  • that’s from the tutorial text not the well commented source code.
• Also there promise of a “30-minute tour” can’t mean that you can program it in 30 minutes

Conclusions

Zend Framework is not bad, compared to using plain PHP there are some significant efficiency gains to be made.  However, when compared with Symfony and other frameworks, like Django & Rails,  it’s missing key features found in modern Web Development frameworks.  The tutorial I described here demonstrated the efficiency issues of not having code generation for the Model layer.  Two other key features are generated CRUD’s for backend site management, and a full MVC plugins like Symfony, Rails, & Django all have.

The long term ramifications of not having plugins and generated code accelerating your project are corners cut on quality, reduced features, scaling problems, and less competitive bids.  The lack of robust plugins in Zend also means that it will never be able have as many features as frameworks that do have Plugins.  Not having code generation means that developers are spending too much time writing mindless getter’s, setter’s, & data grids and not enough time focusing on the core features of the project, or worse they are making compromises in quality to make deadlines.

I don’t believe that the Zend Framework is so far behind that it can’t catch up.  In certain areas it’s actually ahead of the game, however those areas tend to not be fascinating edge cases I get to use every so often, and not features I use on every site every day.  My suggestion for Zend is use the Model layer examples available (Active Record,  SQLAlchemy, Doctrine) and  do something like that.  Doctrine already integrates well with Zend, maybe that would be a good option.  Then start generating admin interfaces or CRUD‘s, this is huge, I find all kinds of ways to use these things to add value to my projects with a little typing on the command line.  Finally Plugins, the most important consideration when reviewing a framework or CMS.  The quantity and quality of plugins demonstrates the quality of the development tool.  It also means that there are developers out there that care about the tool outside of the core team.

If you are interested in learning more about Symfony there are excellent tutorials like the Jobeet example app, a cookbook, a guide book, a reference book, an API, and more on the symfony doc’s page.

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 deceased or almost deceased.  From the EstateSales.net Story page I learned that Dan McQuade had made a little business out fixing up and selling old mixers.  

From that side project he ended up meeting several people who organized estate sales, and from them he found a under served, and inefficient market that could benefit from the reach, information throughput, and scalability of the Internet.

Fortunately his son Mickey knows a thing or two about making websites.  In only a few short years they were an overnight success

Another awesome thing about this site is that they probably don’t have do deal with the hassle of a lot of employees.  Everything is probably, or should be, automated and manageable online from a beach chair in Jamaica.

If I wasn’t such a introverted curmudgeon I’d get out and find my own problems to solve and get rich off of, but for now I’ll just enjoy the success of others.

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 some very interesting Information architecture in the future.

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.

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 it. What it lets you do is create a html table slap in some ID’s & classes, load the js, and you have a really nice sortable table. This sort of elegance in design is never easy and the folks at Millstream Web Software have done a great job on this.

I used it on the Real Estate site I’m working on webdigs.com/mywebdigs (free sign up required) to organize our users favorite saved houses. I’ve found myself using it a lot for my own home search.