Disclaimer: No legal advice, just a little experience report.

If you sell digital things (services, digital goods etc.) to EU countries, you might have to calculate the VAT at the rate of the customer’s country (and even pay it there afterwards).
The latter is even the more inconvenient part, but at least the first part can be done quite easily with good old PHP.

Originally released as a Laravel plugin (or whatever it’s called in their bubble..), there is this very handy library that does the whole complex calculation starting from the seller’s country:

https://github.com/driesvints/vat-calculator

Even more interesting for my purposes was this fork here:

https://github.com/spaze/vat-calculator/

Works on the one hand as a complete standalone version, and still includes updates and is actually also rather a further development than a fork :thuink:
With this then the VAT can be calculated in a few easy calls and life is exceptionally easy.
Not only the country of the customer is taken into account, but also the postal code, because in Germany alone there are several different VAT rates, depending on the island you happen to find yourself on.

// Easy to use!
use Spaze\VatCalculator\VatCalculator;

$vatRates = new VatRates();
$vatCalculator = new VatCalculator($vatRates);
$vatCalculator->calculate(71.00, 'DE' /* $countryCode */, '41352' /* $postalCode or null */,  true /* Whether the customer you're calculating the VAT for is a company */);
$vatCalculator->getTaxRateForLocation('NL');
// Check validity of a VAT number
$vatCalculator->isValidVatNumber('NL123456789B01');

With the appropriate VAT identification number, the annoyance of the collection is then also accordingly omitted.

So nice one, definitely saved me a lot of worries. Github-starred – Cheers guys!

Did you know you can also directly render those as PDF files?

It’s actually quite easy. Like so:

php bin/console workflow:dump myWorkflow | dot -Tpdf > data/workflow/myWorkflow.pdf

As Swagger documentation files tend to get real large und hard too read, splitting the config across multiple files might be a good idea.
With $ref you could do this quite easily.

For example you could reference a single config file per path like so:

swagger: "2.0"
basePath: "my-api/v1/"
info:
  version: "0.0.1"
  title: "my API"
tags:
  - name: "section1"
    description: "Some Section"
  - name: "section2"
    description: "Some other Section"

paths:

  ##section 1

  /section1/some/path:
    $ref: 'paths/section1_some_path.yml'

  /section1/some-other-path:
    $ref: 'paths/section1_some_other_path.yml'

Then have all actions for this path defined in a dedicated file like this:

paths/section1_some_path.yml:

post:
  tags:
  - "section1"
  parameters:
    ...

This really helped me managing larger documentation files, which otherwise tend to get quite hard to read.

When working with this constellation you will sooner or later come across the i18n topic. Most likely you would want to share translations between front- and backend. So that you could keep translations in one single location while using it for frontend templates as well as server-side error messages etc.

One approach would be to store translations in the symfony yml or xml files and deliver those to the frontend via an api endpoint.
Given that front- and backend-code run on the same server, there is an even simpler solution.

Since symfony does not only read yml or xml but also translations in the json format, you can simply keep translations in the frontend and read those files with symfony directly.

All you need to do to achieve this is symlink the angular translation files to your symfony translation catalog location.

messages.de.json -> ../../../web/ng/I18n/de_DE.json
messages.en.json -> ../../../web/ng/I18n/en_EN.json

Disclaimer: This works only for relatively simple use cases with no complex translation patterns. But hey…

When I first tried docker (docker-toolbox for mac) I was really disappointed how slow symfony apps ran inside the container.

I did a bit of research (didn’t completely get it though) – but most of the speed issues that people experience seem to be related to the rather slow file system access in mounted folders.

That’s where dlite really shines.
It’s an app that uses some sort of alternative to virtualbox etc. which has significant speed advantages.

I highly recommend you give it a try if you’re developing with docker in OSX.
Installation with homebrew is quite simple:

brew install dlite
dlite stop && dlite update -v 2.3.0 && dlite start
brew install docker
brew install docker-compose

Another thing I found quite challenging was setting up permissions when running symfony inside docker.
I found a couple of tutorials on that but none of those seemed to really work with my setup.

You could use data containers for the cache and log folders and don’t have any permission problems.
Or just use some internal folder `/tmp/myapp/cache` or `/dev/shm/myapp` (the latter really is fast…).

But any of those approaches will make it difficult to access the cache files from the host.
(I use PHPStorm with the symfony plugin, which relies on parsing some cache files)
It also doesn’t solve the problem of persmissions for the `/web` folders, when installing assets or write to any data folders you also wan’t to mount from the host filesystem.

I have not found a really elegant solution for that, but there’s a workaround which does work magic:

You can set uid of the www-data inside the container your host users’ uid.
Something like `RUN usermod -u 501 www-data` inside your webserver Dockerfile should do the trick for your default user on mac. You can then log into the container and run symfony commands as www-data and have no problems with accessing files from host filesystem, command-line or the webserver.

We put together a docker setup for symfony development, which should work across different operating systems.

https://github.com/nerdpress-org/docker-sf3/

So as a quickstart, after installing docker & dlite just run:

git clone https://github.com/nerdpress-org/docker-sf3.git docker-sf3
cp -r docker-sf3/docker /path/to/your/symfony-project/
cd /path/to/your/symfony-project/docker
sh ./docker.sh -l

As it’s not that much lines of code, I decided to do a port for PHP – et voila:

https://github.com/gherkins/regexpbuilderphp

This is basically regex with PHP the easy way:

Say you want to validate some currency string like “€ 105,99” but want “€ 12.000,95” to be also valid.
Coming up with a regex for that i would find challenging, to say the least.

PHP RegExpBuilder to the rescue:

(you can simply install it via composer)

composer require gherkins/regexpbuilderphp:dev-master

Then you’ll be able to do:

$builder = new \Gherkins\RegExpBuilderPHP\RegExpBuilder();


    $builder1 = $builder
        ->find("€")
        ->exactly(1)->whitespace()
        ->min(1)->digits()
        ->then(",")
        ->digit()
        ->digit();
        
    //builder 1 will take care of the cases without a thousand-seperator

    $builder1->getRegExp()->test("€ 128,99");     //true
    $builder1->getRegExp()->test("€ 81,99");      //true
        
       
                     
    $builder2 = $builder->getNew()
        ->find("€")
        ->exactly(1)->whitespace()
        ->min(1)->digits()
        ->then(".")
        ->exactly(3)->digits()
        ->then(",")
        ->digit()
        ->digit();
        
    //builder 1 will take care of the cases *with* the thousand-seperator

    $builder2->getRegExp()->test("€ 1.228,99");   //true
    $builder2->getRegExp()->test("€ 452.000,99"); //true
        
        
    //you can then combine both builders to get a regex which handles all cases:
       
    $combined = $this->r->getNew()
        ->either($builder1)
        ->orLike($builder2);
        
    $combined->getRegExp()->test("€ 128,99");     //true
    $combined->getRegExp()->test("€ 81,99");      //true
    $combined->getRegExp()->test("€ 1.228,99");   //true
    $combined->getRegExp()->test("€ 452.000,99"); //true

This might be a bit verbose if you don’t have any problem with:

(?:(?:(?:(?:€){1,1})(?:(?:\s){1,1})(?:(?:(?:\d)){1,})(?:(?:,){1,1})(?:\d)(?:\d))|(?:(?:(?:€){1,1})(?:(?:\s){1,1})(?:(?:(?:\d)){1,})(?:(?:\.){1,1})(?:(?:(?:\d)){3,3})(?:(?:,){1,1})(?:\d)(?:\d)))

..but I really do like it ;)

https://github.com/gherkins/regexpbuilderphp

Doctrine_Inflector::urlize()

 method from Doctrine1 in Symfony2 with Doctrine2.

Of course there’s the doctrine extensions with the sluggable behaviour, but sometimes it seems a bit overhead for smaller tasks.

I just recently discovered Behat Transliterator, which brings just the dearly missed urlize function back.

Just do

composer require behat/transliterator

As it’s an abstract class, you’ll have to create your own Helper class extending it.

And there you go:

MyTextHelper::urlize("how great is that?")

Integrating the Blog in Silverstripe (which indeed would have made things simpler) was not  an option at the time. The usage of loads of WordPress plugins would’ve made a rewrite a major task, which was out of the budget.

The blog was integrated in the same page layout as the rest of the website. So ideally it would at least share the same Templates for header, footer etc. and would integrate the sites navigation built by Silverstripe.

But how to use the pre-rendered Silverstripe template .ss files in a WordPress theme?

The following worked fine for me, using Silverstripe 3.0:

In the functions.php of the wordpress theme i added this code to init a silverstripe controller:

//init silverstripe
require_once '[path-to-silverstripe-root-folder]/framework/core/Core.php';
require_once '[path-to-silverstripe-root-folder]/framework/model/DB.php';
//init the Database connection
DB::connect($databaseConfig);
//fetch some page, it that case i used the 404 ErrorPage
$SSPage = DataObject::get_by_id('Page', 4);
//init a the controller and cache it as a global variable
$SSctrl = new ContentController($SSPage);
//add the controller to the stack, so it becomes available as the current controller for the template
$SSctrl->pushCurrent();

and also some helper functions to get the actual templates

function get_Silverstripe_Header()
{
    global $SSctrl;
    //render the controller with the includes/Header.ss template
    return $SSctrl->renderWith('Header');
}

function get_Silverstripe_Footer()
{
    global $SSctrl;
    //..or any other template, like the footer
    return $SSctrl->renderWith('Footer');
}

…and then just use these in the templates:

<?php echo get_Silverstripe_Header() ?>

Of course this is no way limited to WordPress. It just an idea how to access Silverstripe Templates outside of Silverstripe code.

So here are some more as a JSFiddle:

http://jsfiddle.net/HMkad/2/embedded/result/

If you’d like to extend the collection just edit the markup in the fiddle.
And add something like this:

<li>
  <p>
    <strong>?showqueries=1</strong> - List all SQL queries executed
  </p>
  <a data-param="showqueries=1" href="#">
    SS:showqueries=1
  </a>
</li>

…or this:

 <li>
   <p>
    <strong>dev/build</strong> - Rebuild the entire database and manifest
   </p>
   <a data-param="dev/build" href="#">
     SS:dev/build
   </a>
</li>

Have fun!

http://jsfiddle.net/QMeuV/1/embedded/result/

Its hosted on jsfiddle.net and enables you to create Bookmarklets which use jQuery based on the code i found here:
http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/23/make-your-own-bookmarklets-with-jquery/

It also features Javascript Syntax Highlighting using http://codemirror.net/.

*UPDATE*
this tool now (also) lives on https://github.com/gherkins/bookmarklet-generator