Matthew Bull

web development

Drupal as an enterprise CMS?

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

  I've been looking a lot recently at Drupal not just as an open source CMS, but as a viable enterprise level CMS. Despite my earlier misgivings I think Drupal has a lot going for it, and it may be that over the next couple of years it will become a ...

acquia

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

Acquia is a company set up by Dries Buytaert, the guy who developed drupal, in an apparent attempt to get drupal taken more seriously by companies and institutions. The idea seems to be that Acquia (carrying on the water theme: druppel means 'drop' in Flemish) will provide commercial level support for ...

IWMW 2008 - day 2

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

So, we're into day 2 of the IWMW 2008 conference at Aberdeen. Day 1 passed with much alcohol, dancing, Aberdonian 'furry boots', oh and some web stuff too. I think the highlight was an excellent opening talk by Derrick McClure from the Centre for Linguistic Research at Aberdeen. It was a ...

symfony 1.1 and 1.2

Sunday, July 20th, 2008

symfony 1.1 went live just a month or so ago, and in the relatively short history of symfony is somewhat of a revolution. In fact, the shift in a minor version number belies the effort and heartache that seems to have gone into the newer version, and one wonders at the ...

symfony’s sfGuard plugin and LDAP

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

A while ago I needed to hook up symfony's excellent sfGuard plugin to some LDAP functionality. There are a couple of issues with the plugin and the readme which I think need fixing. In particular, there is no support for checking both LDAP and standard sfGuard passwords. This is absolutely essential ...

The Squiz Licence

Saturday, May 17th, 2008

I've recently been looking more closely at MySource Matrix, an open source PHP-based CMS. It's very important to realise that 'open source' is not necessarily what you might think in the real world of running an enterprise CMS. Squiz So what about the details of using MySource Matrix in anger? First off, ...

symfony and LDAP

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

I've recently been looking at the essential (ie why isn't it included in the core?) symfony plugin sfGuard. It offers are really nice, simple way of building a simple user, role, and permissions system into your symfony app. The great thing is that with a little tweaking (documentation not great) you ...

symfony routes

Monday, April 28th, 2008

Routing rules in symfony are a way of getting simple url's looking the way you want. So rather than ugly things that show everyone how your system works like: matthewbull.net/index.php?id=3&detail=false&category=true&year=2008 you can have things like: matthewbull.net/id/3/detail/false/category/true/year/2008 Even better than that, using symfony's routing system allows you to completely decouple a url from your code. ...

symfony

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

I've recently been deploying some symfony (http://www.symfony-project.org/) applications at The University of Kent. I'm pleased with the results. Symfony is an MVC framework, along the lines of Ruby on Rails, but based on PHP5. It is widely used, including yahoo bookmarks: http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000376.html and the beta of the new version of del.icio.us: http://www.symfony-project.org/blog/2007/10/02/delicious-preview-built-with-symfony Why? So why did I ...