Check if a country is an EU country in Magento

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.

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Caching Data in Symfony2

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.
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Opengraph MetaTags in SilverStripe

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.
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javascript benchmarking with jsperf

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:

jsPerf

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.
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[Symfony 2] composer.json for a assumed-stable symfony 2 distribution

This small composer.json file is used in a project i am working on atm, feel free to use it at own risk. I will provide non-periodical updates and hopefully soon a full upgrade to symfony 2.1.x including doctrine orm 2.2.x.

I still did not get the point regarding dependency resolution, so i simply “composed” the composer file by writing down my own requirements (“i want only the hottest, newest stuff!!”, then tracked down the error messages, removing them by explicetly writing down the missing dependencies by using the latest “dev-*” versions. After that i tried to run the project, which actually did not work, but selective downgrade of some of the bundles (framework, security-extra blahblah) finally did the job. Continue reading “[Symfony 2] composer.json for a assumed-stable symfony 2 distribution”