The goal of this blog post is to number one serve me as a todo list of stuff that I personally think needs to be fixed before Symfony2 can be released. Hopefully it will also entice some people to help out with these tasks. I am focusing on the medium to large tasks. There are of course still a fair number of smaller fixes that need to be applied.

Items on the list include:

• switch Security/Validation components to using message key's rather than full sentences
• Assetic documentation
• Adding a DIC aware Serializer
• Better support for SSL'ed urls and assets
• ttempt to automatically determine service scopes

In this video I'm going to be demonstrating migrations which I touched on in the last video but I felt I should go into them in more depth. Migrations [...] are essentially a way to stage changes for your database in a way that means the changes can be independent from the schema as a whole.

He walks you through the creation of a migration with the help of the Oil command line tool. The generated classes include "up" and "down" methods for the creation and rollback of your changes. He shows the process to create a simple task and how to use the built-in console to interactively work with the framework. You can find out more about Fuel on the Fuel documentation section of the project's site.

All right, I know that you're now saying that's not breaking news, since the implementation of objects is an old programming feature. However, PHP 5 has a lot more to offer when it comes to using MySQL. If you're using MySQL 4.1 and above, the good news is that PHP 5 offers a fairly comprehensive extension, called "mysqli," which allows you to interact natively with MySQL via an object-based approach, aside from taking advantage of the new functionality provided by the database server.

They start with a basic introduction of the extension, including how to perform some of the basic bits of functionality on your MySQL database - connecting, getting host information, and even performing a simple query. They then get into the "real power" behind the mysqli extension, the ability to run multiple queries and handle natively the results of those queries easily. They wrap it all up with a look at using prepared statements with this extension, showing the prepare, bind_param, and execute functions.

He not only talks about the package, he also goes through the three iterations that it took to get the package where it is today. It has evolved from a simple PEAR package, to an automatically adjusting PEAR package, and enhancing it to add administrative functionality to maintaining it. He notes that there are still a few manual tasks that have to be done, but overall, it's a nice and easy process.