So this weekend I visited my hometown Berlin for the PHPUCEU. Actually this was in very close proximity to where I grew up, which was nice as I was staying at my parents place. Usually staying there requires a one hour ride to the hipster areas of Berlin to attend a conference. In this case it was just a 2 stop U-Bahn ride. That being said, this wasn't a "normal" conference. This was an unconference. As such attendees proposed talks they could give, but also talks that they would want to hear. Every morning every attendee would then have two votes for talks. The top voted talks would then be distributed across the 4 slots in the 3 available tracks. As such several of the sessions ended up being quite ad hoc with multiple people chipping in with what they new about the topic. What is also special about this event is that the sessions are just as long as the breaks to facilitate idea exchange about the session topics, but also about other topics. Overall I found this to be an absolutely thrilling experience.
Yesterday i tagged version Beta 1 of jackalope-jackrabbit, our PHP Content Repository (PHPCR) implementation. PHPCR is an API to manage tree-structured data, modelled after the Java Content Repository JCR specification. Time to summarize what jackalope can do today. For people already familiar with Jackalope, I summarize the recent changes at the bottom.
I have been on the conference tour for quite some time now and on top of that I travel about every 2nd weekend to some frisbee tournament around the globe. Yet I have never visited the UK. So far the most I have seen of the UK was transiting via direct bus from one London airport to another. So I was quite thrilled when my talk about the Symfony2 CMF was accepted for PHPNE in Newcastle. I was also quite keen to learn more about the PHP community over there. At any rate I flew in on Monday evening and made my way to the hotel in a light drizzle which perfectly matched my image of UK weather. But even in the dark one could make out the historical feel to the architecture in the city center. I cut the sightseeing short and crashed into bed. Next day I made my way to the conference venue which was set at a movie theatre. There were countless busy bee's from the organization team and in general this conference was organized top notch. Quite an impressive achievement given that this was the very first PHPNE. The theatre also provided top notch projectors and of course comfy seats.
In January, Lukas wrote a collection of things left to do. Later I wrote a tentative release schedule that turned out to be too optimistic. I just updated that document with new dates. Sorry about this.
There are two actually quite cool reasons for the delays. One is that we had two projects at Liip where we had to integrate the CMF into existing projects. It was fun, but we found quite a lot of issues and missing features in Doctrine PHPCR-ODM that we fixed resp. implemented. (The Symfony2 Form component is incredibly powerful, but requires the persistance layer to work very exactly and we did not want any more workarounds and hacks to a achieve functionality.) The other reason is that many other people started using the CMF too. Some found issues that need to be fixed, others even managed to contribute fixes themselves - but which took time to review and comment on. Also, a lot of new features have been built or are currently being built.
Last thursday, i did the webinar about PHPCR and Magnolia CMS. You can download the slides or watch the recorded presentation (you need to register to see it). Thanks to all the attendees, I hope you enjoyed it.
There where some questions that i want to answer here on the blog to have the answers available to everybody.
Liip is a PHP company but we are not agnostic to what happens in other fields. And sometimes we need to integrate with other systems like a Java based CMS. Rather than using something radical like Quercus, a Java implementation of the PHP language or the rather fiddly PHP/Java Bridge, we wanted something less intrusive and more general purpose.
As you might remember Lukas and I started working on some changes to the elastica library and the Symfony 2 Bundle FOQElasticaBundle during a hackday. You might also remember that we were not entirely happy with our solution for the infinite nesting levels in the mappings configuration of the bundle. Also, we got some feedback from other developers upon our pull requests to both the library and the bundle. In order to be able to clean up our code and respond to the feedback I asked for some innovation budget and got it. Thanks for that! :)
The goal of this hackday, done by Lukas Smith and me, was to adapt the FOQElasticaBundle and the Elastica library so we can use it for one of our current projects. The two main problems were the following:
Symfony CMF: what is left todo?
Just as Fabien did in his "Symfony 2.2 Schedule Update" I
would first like to wish everyone a happy 2013. But as Fabien did, I also want to get back to business now too.
Earlier this week, Moodle announced the availability of Moodle 2.4, with many new improvements, after almost 6 months worth of work since the release of Moodle 2.3 (in June 2012).
Within the e-learning team at Liip, we are very excited to see this new version of Moodle released for public consumption: it's various new features and performance improvements will power all our next Moodle client developments.
