I'm not a big fan of ORMs, especially in PHP world when all dies at the end of each request. Plain SQL is easy to understand and very powerful. Anyway in PHP we have Doctrine. Doctrine is a amazing project, probably (with permission of Symfony2) the most advanced PHP project, but I normally prefer to work with SQL instead of Doctrine. [...] Due to my daily work I need to connect to different databases (not only one) in my applications.

He shows the normal setup using the "parameters.yml" file to define the multiple database connections but notes that this isn't the most ideal solution. Instead, he walks you through the steps to create the "databases.yml" configuration file and a simple "Db" class that acts as an interface to pull the PDO objects from the container. You can then just call the "get" method on the container to extract the fully configured PDO object, ready for use.

Unfortunately the Symfony documentation does not provide any details on how to configure Assetic to use LESS. There is a blog post by Dustin Dobervich that gives some pointers, but after following the instructions, Assetic issued the following error: Cannot find module 'less'. We searched around without much success. After several tries, we nailed the configuration.

It's an easy two-step process: first you be sure you have "npm" (the package manager) installed on your system, then you modify your Symfony app.yml file to point to the Node modules path.

To integrate your project with travis the only thing necesarry is to have a .travis.yml file and a working PHPUnit test setup like http://github.com/simplethings/SimpleThingsFormExtraBundle. Where the Tests/vendors.php script is executed before the tests are perfomed. But it would be way cooler to just have Composer handle the autoloading and dependencies.

A sample .travis.yml file is included in the post (also here) as well as instructions for grabbing dependencies and including the autoload process in your application's bootstrap.

Writing unit tests for your Propel or Doctrine model is much more easier as of symfony 1.1. In this tutorial, you will learn some great tips and best practices to write better tests for your models.

The tutorial walks you through the creating of a simple test - evaluating a few criteria for the database contents. The entire thing is contained inside of YML files and is easily run via the sfConfig and integrated Propel functionality.

A lot of the content on reviewsBy.us and other sites we make using symfony have dynamic content. We try to have our page titles reflect the content by prepending the name of the specific restaurant, document or menu item before the site name.

Their path to the prize is a method, prependTitle that's included in a class (myActions.class.php) and used via it's reference in the application's app.yml file.

Migrations are a wonderful technique to keep your database in sync with your code. When working on a project as a team, migrations can save your life. Please join me and get a quick introduction to migrations in CakePHP and become a happier coder.

He starts by explaining what migrations are (yml files that contain database construction/destruction information), how to execute them in your application, and how to construct your own.