…dev, tech problems and solutions.
I you ever wondered how you can check if a Country, resp. a Country Code, is in the EU, i did the following:
Magento has a config value: eu_countries that lists all Countries of the EU.
You can find it in the backend under:
Configuration -> General -> Country Options.
Against this list you can validate your country code, f.e. that you got in an billing or shipping address of an order.
Continue reading “Check if a country is an EU country in Magento”
Symfony2 has a great Caching Layer based on its HTTP Cache. But this aims mainly on caching the views.
In some apps however you need to cache data behind the scenes, f.e. responses from API calls or custom objects sets.
Symfony2 itself doesnt have such a functionality on first sight (symfony2 doesnt, but Doctrine, see below) and so I searched for one and first found a bundle which utilize the Zend Cache lib:
https://github.com/KnpLabs/KnpZendCacheBundle
This worked well but as discussed here(https://github.com/KnpLabs/KnpZendCacheBundle/issues/2) this adds dependencies to your Symfony2 project. This is actually not necessary since Doctrine/Commons is almost always part of your Symfony2 distribution and the Doctrine/Commons provides a Cache Layer as well.
A very good one, indeed.
So if you need to cache data use Doctrine/Commons.
Continue reading “Caching Data in Symfony2”
First off some general thoughts on how to use opengraph metatags.
Since the uprise of Social Media, sharing sites, deeplinking and snippetting content has become a important aspect of SEO and so almost every site has some kind of facebook-like-button to let user easily share the page.
Most sharing endpoints, facebook f.e, bring a more or less good parser/linter to summarize the page content. So the first text paragraph will be taken as text snippet and all images that fit certain requirements will be offered to chose a preview-thumbnail from.
So far so good.
Continue reading “Opengraph MetaTags in SilverStripe”
When you start with symfony you probably use the Symfony Standard Edition.
This is a quite good start but there are somethings that helped me and might help you aswell.
Since every beginning is “schwer” :)
So here there are.
Continue reading “Symfony2 Starter Tweaks”
This is a reoccuring requirement: you need a profile for some object in your project.
FE you have a company, a member or a location that should get an address, a marker on the map, an icon, homepage etc.
So I created a small silverstripe module that adds a profile tab to any object you choose in your Silverstripe CMS backend.
I might be a bit late (yeaikno it exist over a year now and a bunch of blogs had it covered) but nevertheless i would like to point out a very helpful online tool i recently ran into:
Its basically a online benchmark tool for testing different approaches in javascript.
It covers some important aspects of benchmarking, that your homemade bench probably wont have like milliseconds accuracy & statistical analysis.
The tests are run on your browser and the results will feed the “browserscope”. A graph of the “highest known results” for the participating browsers.
So we can see some kind of comparison.
Continue reading “javascript benchmarking with jsperf”
Ever wondered how to use the modulo operator in twig, the template engine of symfony?
Actually its like in PHP:
{{ 11 % 7 }}
As described here
But i guess for most use cases modulus is used to check if a number is divisible by another number.
Therefore Twig has the very conveniant divisible by test function.
{% if loop.index is divisible by(3) %}
We thought we had to improve our SilverStripe setup script for our development environment.
So Max and me rewrote it to add submodules and some other improvements.
Just run:
./install_silverstripe.sh mynewproject tags/2.4.7
and you have
Using MongoDB in your Silex Project is quite easy.
I will show this with my Superleansilexplate and will integrate it there as an example.
Since i dont want to integrate MongoDB in Superleansilexplate it will just become an additional gist.
Given you have some smaller amount of data like a counter that needs to be stored or other loose coupled datasets, we simply speak to MongoDB “directly” and store the data via Doctrine MongoDB Abstraction Layer.
Since i presume the Data / Document Structure isnt that complex we dont use Doctrine MongoDB ODM (the Object Document Mapper).
If you want to use it instead, try this Silex Extensions.
Alright, SilverStripe again, still our CMS of choice.
Today i’d like to promote a very helpful module that provides Register and Profile Pages for Members for the Frontend.
The memberprofiles module.
It comes with a lot of features and customize options for nearly everthing you might need for Frontend Member Handling.
Further it is fully extendible to customize it even more.
For a starter tutorial i recommend a very good post by deadlytechnology.
I would like to describe how you extend it.
First lets install it (with the orderable module dependency):