Getting Started with symfony

I have decided to learn symfony again.

When looking for a PHP framework to use, it really wasn’t a hard decision.

I did do some research to make sure that I was choosing the best framework and my research just confirmed my decision to use symfony.

I do know there will be a learning curve. When I used it before, it was still on one of the 1.x versions. I know that symfony2 made serious changes. I’m sure symfony3 will make even more when it comes out next year.

Each time I’ve learned a new framework, I’ve wished that I had documented the learning process for others who need to learn the framework. This time, I plan to do just that. I want to document what I do and how I do it so that others may learn from the experience.

I have two projects in mind to begin. The first is a money management application for myself. The other is an event management application for one of my clients. My client’s site is built on WordPress and we’ve looked for calendar/events/scheduling plugins. I just don’t find any that work well. WordPress is VERY good at what it does, but it just wasn’t built to handle complex applications.

As I work through each of these projects, I want to share what I’m doing and how quickly and easily it is to get it working in symfony, assuming that it is. I feel sure that it will be quick and easy since it would have been in 1.x. I’m sure 2.x will work even better making the development even faster.

To begin my symfony adventure, I signed up in the symfony community. I signed up for the Google Groups symfony mailing list. And I bookmarked both the #symfony IRC channel on freenode webchat and the community forum.

I also upgraded my MAMP 2.0 to 3.0. It’s been a while since I seriously used MAMP and since I had upgraded my Mac operating system to Yosemite, I thought it would be best to start with the latest version of MAMP too. For those who don’t know, MAMP stands for My Apache, MySQL and PHP. It’s a webserver for my local machine. I see they now offer a version for Windows too.

I prefer using MAMP Pro so I don’t have to worry with setting up a webserver on my machine. It also makes setting up individual hosts or websites on my computer easier than the stand MAMP setup (not Pro). It’s a small price to pay to save myself a lot of time. I love MAMP!

I will be using Coda as my editor. I love Coda because it has FTP built in. It makes working on a project on my local machine very easy since I can connect to the remote server and load the files into the same directory structure.

If you are following along with me and working through these projects with me, you will want to get a good text editor. If it doesn’t have an FTP client bundled with it, you’ll need one of those too. Please leave the name of your favorite text editor in the comments below so that others can find one that works for them.

We’re off to a good start!