A quick tip for deploying a Symfony 1.1 application. If you need a find a Symfony 1.1 CLI task, simply type

php symfony list

If you are like me and have a Symfony 1.1 installed and sym linked in a different location for testing purposes, you would type

symfony11 list

One of this year’s South By Southwest winners is Paper Critters. It’s a lot of fun to create your own critter. There are a lot of critters created. Here are a few of the critters that I have made.

Following the lead of Niko at Prendre un Cafe, I decided that I wanted to experience the new features of Symfony 1.1. First, let me say that I can’t read French, but I got the gist of what to do from the well documented Symfony 1.1 setup steps that Niko provided. Niko’s installation technique allows Symfony 1.0 and Symfony 1.1 to be run in parallel.

Some of the new features of Symfony 1.1:

• Configuration is moving away from the config.php file to a configuration class
• Form and validation classes have been reworked
• Better UJS support
• CLI tasks as classes

I will investigating these changes over the next week or so as I build a test application to explore these changes. For now, though, here is how I installed Symfony 1.1 on Ubuntu. Once again this install process was greatly aided by a post at Prendre un Cafe. Thanks.

First, install Symfony 1.1.
cd /usr/share/php5 , this is where my Symfony 1.0x install resides.
svn co http://svn.symfony-project.com/branches/1.1/ symfony11


Second, hook up the CLI command symfony11 to the right place in the newly installed Symfony 1.1 and verify the command and install.
ln -s /usr/share/php5/symfony11/data/bin/symfony /usr/bin/symfony11
symfony11 -V


The symfony11 -V command should output something similar to “symfony version 1.1.0-DEV (/usr/share/php5/symfony11/lib).”

Next, create a test directory in your Symfony projects directory, generate a test project and an app.
cd /path/to/sf/projects/
mkdir sf11test
cd sf11test
symfony11 generate:project sf11test
symfony11 generate:app frontend


Edit your Apache2 virtual host file.

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName local.sf11.com
  DocumentRoot "/path/to/symfony/projects/sf11test/web"
  DirectoryIndex index.php
  Alias /sf /usr/share/php5/symfony11/data/web/sf
  <Directory "/usr/share/php5/symfony11/data/web/sf">
    AllowOverride All
    Allow from All
  </Directory>
  <Directory "/path/to/symfony/projects/sf11test/web">
    AllowOverride All
    Allow from All
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Remember to change /path/to/symfony/projects and /usr/share/php5/symfony11/ to reflect your paths.

Finally, edit your /etc/hosts file to include local.sf11.com or whatever your fake domain happens to be.

You can now surf to local.sf11.com to see your newly installed Symfony 1.1 project.

The Web Standards Project has released the third version of their Acid test. The goal of this test is to create a common testing framework to verify a browser implementation of web standards. The Acid3 test are organized in buckets and stress the following:

• Bucket 1: DOM Traversal, DOM Range, HTTP
• Bucket 2: DOM2 Core and DOM2 Events
• Bucket 3: DOM2 Views, DOM2 Style, CSS 3 selectors and Media Queries
• Bucket 4: Behavior of HTML tables and forms when manipulated by script and DOM2 HTML
• Bucket 5: Tests from the Acid3 Competition (SVG,[5] HTML, SMIL, Unicode…)
• Bucket 6: ECMAScript

From Wikipedia’s entry on Acid3

As of now, no browser passes Acid3. Anomalous Anomaly has tested numerous browser against Acid3 and found some pretty interesting results, namely that the old IE5.5 out performs both IE6 and IE7, but luckily not IE8, which comes in with a paltry 17% of the test passed.