Nowadays a lot of effort is made to have support for Doctrine in the Zend Framework. Doctrine is a great tool and having the support for all Doctrine specialities (code generations, migrations and behaviours like i18n and versionable) is a must for all real developers. Searching the Internet about a variety of topics, I think I found now the perfect method to have Doctrine loaded all your models.

Yesterday I received the book "Zend Framework 1.8: Web Application Development" for reviewing. It's written by Keith Pope and the publisher, Packt Publishing contacted my with the question if I'd like to review the book and place a summary at my blog. Well, of course I'd like to do that.

In the upcoming weeks I have my exams, so there won't be much time for reviewing. After this week I'm able to read the book thoroughly and write my review. Others are already done with the review, but nethertheless I'm happy to do it. Want a copy of the book yourself, you can order it online at Packt.

We developers like to make it our users as easy as possible to use the Soflomo system. The content management system is meant to serve any kind of user, so also those who don't understand the principles of resizing image for better and faster displaying.

Therefore an automated resize script is a necessary tool to have inside the system. A user can point to an image to display it on its website by using a common image dialog, but different pages requires different image sizes for e.g. a blog or portfolio item. It's too difficult for them to upload multiple resized images for all the use cases, so uploading the original, largest image must be enough.

At Soflomo we have constructed such a tool inside the Sofzo, the Soflomo framework. It's useful for our clients, but also front end webdevelopers might have some benefits from using the image processor. Yes, I'm talking now of an image processor and not a simple resize tool anymore. Sometimes you need a square crop of your image. Sometimes you need a bit more sharpening because the image is getting blurry. And that's not the work of an image resizer, it has become a real processor.

CAPTCHAs are a well known phenomena for any kind of webform. Reactions for blogs, contact forms for companies and registration forms for social websites, they all got it. The problem is the automated injection from bots to enter messages with links to all kind of websites. Using CAPTCHA is likely to force a human for some input which is likely not to happen with bots. Unfortunately bots are getting smarter and even the worst readable CAPTCHA images can be read by bots.

Another invention came: simple questions like "what is two times three". That would be "six", isn't it? The problem is this is working for small websites. If Google uses this question (e.g. automated with different questions), bots will fetch all the options and are still able to continue.

One thing many people missed is the likelihood a bot will try to fill in all the input fields available inside the form, so it can enter the most information. But you can validate all the user input; you can try placing an input field which won't be filled in by human beings. Bots will fill the field and you know it's a bot.

After Matthew said he'd be interested in a new "robust client" for ZF, I decided to sum things up. I have to sign a CLA, write a proposal and do some coding stuff if I want to contribute my code to ZF. But before going into the Zend Framework community, it's always a good idea to keep your head cool and think about some things first.

Some time ago Matt Cockayne posted a solution to get TinyMce working as a form element inside a Zend_Form_Element. I had a look at his code and thought it was a very good one. But as critical I am, I thought there were some points still able to improve.

Soflomo has built its CMS upon the Zend Framework and because I use Flickr for my on-line gallery, I've done some research into the Zend_Service_Flickr component of ZF. I'd be nice if I could have used it to manage my photos (and sets and collection) to display to all visitors. Unfortunately its structure is very simple, it's more a wrapper around the REST client: you have to make the api calls yourself and get a very common 'result set' from the service back.

I thought it could be done such better with a more O/R like service. You'll have Flickr_Collection, Flickr_Set, Flickr_User and Flickr_Photo objects, all very clear and with distinguished roles. You can ask a set for its photos, a collection for its sets and so on.

Since a while I have with two partners a company called Soflomo. Soflomo is a new design and ICT company, but different from others (of course!). We can combine avant garde designs with innovative technological solutions and assist our customers the whole traject. From consultancy to the hosting of their website.

At Soflomo we're still developing our CMS but we've a solid base thanks to the PHP framework of Zend. With our product we deliver very customer specific solutions but without changing the code a lot. It saves a lot of time: with a specific configuration and modular structure we're able to change the standard components to the wishes of our clients.

Because we'd like to test some parts, my own website is converted into the Soflomo CMS (we still don't have a better name). You probably can find some quirks and not all parts work flawlessly but this is still a good place to test the things.

If you see something what might be a bug, please let me know. Upcoming summer we're ready to finish our product so we're happy to get feedback from you.

There are many use cases to mention when you want to notify your visitor: login is successful, the contact form is submitted etcetera. I've seen some projects where these messages are hard-coded inside the view or pushed by the controller inside a view. This is not exactly the best option, because it adds some logic from another layer inside your controller.

Sinds 30 september 2005 wordt een groot gedeelte van de nummers die ik luister bijgehouden door een website, Last.fm. Artiest, album, nummer, genre. Alles komt in een bibliotheek terecht en daarmee kan ik vergelijkende artiesten vinden, die ik waarschijnlijk wel leuk zou vinden.

Met de teller op 27.901 afgespeelde nummers heb ik ook meer dan 1000 artiesten in mijn bibliotheek! 1039 om precies te zijn. Top artiesten zijn o.a. The Prodigy, Pink Floyd, Daft Punk en Kate Bush.