As a web developer whose browser of choice is Google Chome, I use the Chrome console a lot. Chrome is already the best browser out there and always getting better. More than the browsing experience though, I maintain that it has the best dev environment available. It is the little things that really make Chrome so much better than its compeditors (docking to the right for instance). As if you needed any more reasons to like Chrome, the Chrome team just pushed an update to ‘clean up the console.’ This was a fix that did nothing for end user usablity, but fixes that annoying little message telling you about your font mimetypes. This was not a fix that I needed for development, just a nicity that the Chome team provided.

Let me start by saying that I was very excited by IE10. Internet Explorer 10 was supposed to be the premier IE web browser. Microsoft was so confident that they created a browser that could meet modern standards that they dropped conditional comments in IE10. If you don’t know anything about developing for IE, just know that it sucks; it was, however, aleviated some by conditional comments that allowed for custom styles/js/whatever for IE versions. My first time working with IE10 I was made harshly aware that conditional comments no longer work. What’s worse, my site that functioned and looked great in IE9 no longer functioned in IE10. How does this happen?

With eZ Publish moving to Symfony2, I found that I was in need of learning some new coding standards. I never really looked into PHP CodeSniffer while doing eZ Publish development (most of my code was in the templates), so I never really thought about PHP CodeSniffer as an option until starting work with Symphony2. To the point, I just wanted to share the Symfony2 PHP CodeSniffer Coding Standard on Github. It is really easy to install and because phpcs works with PHPStorm and Sublime Text 2, sniffing out php files couldn’t be easier.

I have been working on getting a new site theme up and running for a while now. My hold up was that I could never commit to a platform. I knew that I wanted off Wordpress and onto something more developer friendly. Originally I was going to put this site on eZ Publish, but that just seemed like overkill. Next I thought about creating a Symfony2 blog, but I wanted to cheapen my hosting options so I opted against Symfony2. I finally decided upon Rails, hosted on the free tier of Heroku.

I am very new to Symfony development. While developing a side project app I found I needed to control access to a certain area to logged in users only. Based on my previous development history I was expecting to have to determine if a user was logged in via the controller. I figured I would need to find an is_logged_in boolean and use it to determine user access control. What I found while doing my development is that Symfony2 takes care of access control in a much more eloquent way. Rather than having to determine if a user is logged in inside each controller, Symfony2 controls access using a system similar to its routing system. Inside a Symfony2 app there is, by default, a security.yml file that is used to control access. Inside the security.yml file locate the access_control declaration. By simply declaring a route inside the access_control yml array we can control which users have access to which routes, like so:

I finally decided on my first eZ Publish 5 project… my site of course. I am currently in the middle of upgrading my wordpress install to eZ Publish. Honestly, I don’t really need anything more than a simple Wordpress install, but it will be nice to get an eZ5 site under my belt.

Seeing as I am in the middle of development, there have been a few bumps in the development road that I have found and would like to share. Firstly, I can find no way to run eZ Publish 5 completely in legacy mode, no matter what I do my pagelayout template needs to be a twig template. I posed the question to the eZ Community and it sounds like this should be possible, but it just wouldn’t work for me (see the discussion here). I actually don’t have a problem with this, it’s not like being forced to use Symfony is a bad thing.