On the ServerGrove blog there's a new post showing you how to customize those default error pages that show up in a Symfony2 application when an exception is thrown.

The framework produces a very detailed report when in the development environment. However, when you put the application in the production server, you will need to display a user friendly page. Creating a custom page is actually simple. All you need to do is define a controller/action pair that will generate the response. You can either use an existing controller or create one specifically to handle errors.

They include a sample "lean" controller to just handle the output for the exceptions as well as a template to go with it that just has a basic customized message and a status code for the exception. Using it is simple - just add an "exception_listener" setting to your configuration file to point at the new controller.

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial walking you through the creation of a simple WordPress plugin that shows the latest YouTube video from your blog's channel.

Think of plugins as components where you put your functionality and widgets as components of your user interface. Building your own WordPress plugins and widgets will make your blog truly original, and all you need is basic PHP and HTML knowledge - and your imagination.

They help you get started with defining a few constants, registering the actions with WordPress, building the widget (with complete cut-and-paste-able code) and including it in your WordPress blog. You can download the complete source if you want to get started quickly.

The Symfony blog points out a handy feature included with the latest release of the framework - a web debugging toolbar that gives you a quick summary of the stats for the current page.

The symfony web debug toolbar is one of the developer best friend. It is always conveniently accessible in the browser when using the development environment. It gives you everything you need to know about the current page and ease the debugging of your applications. Until now, all the information available in this toolbar were hardcoded. But as of symfony 1.2, the web debug toolbar is entirely configurable.

The toolbar contains information like: the version of the framework you're using, cache information, logging, memory usage and the execution time of the page. They also include a bit on how to customize your toolbar, adding and removing panels from the bar as well as changing up the look with styles.

On the ProDevTips blog, there's a new post showing how to bend the Zend_Db table component of the Zend Framework to your will and customize parts of it for your application.

For some time now I've been working on an administrative backend system. I quickly found the need to extend DB Table with more stuff than needed when I extended the Zend Framework, it's mostly convenience functions designed to reduce repetitive code snippets.

He illustrates with some of the custom override functions he's made including versions of updateOne, exists, fetchOne and fetchSomething.

Daniel O'Connor has posted a quick guide to customizing your installation of the PHP_CodeSniffer PEAR package to match the coding standard you'd like.

PHP_CodeSniffer is a PEAR package which detects potential coding problems and enforces your style guide. The default is the PEAR coding standard, but you can easily change that.

His method requires the creation of a custom "FooCodingStandard.php" (named whatever you'd like, of course) that contains a class/method defining the "sniffs" you'd like to use for your standard. Use "pfm" to make it into a package and install it to your system - you'll be all set.

At the Developer Tutorials blog mentions, a new offering from Yahoo! is making it simple to "spice up" the results for your site when someone searches for it - Yahoo! Searchmonkey. It's a PHP-based platform for creating an application that's returned inline with the search results.

Rasmus Lerdorf has an example of the potential output for a search returning a restaurant's name, links to its menu/wine list, reviews and a link to make a reservation.

There's lots of fun things to do with this tool - check out the developer page for more information and grab the developer tool to jump in and get started building your own custom result.

The Developer Tutorials website has posted an article with a sort of beginner's guide to working with WordPress and its customization.

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. [...] WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.

They briefly mention how to use the administrative interface for the tool, but focus mainly on the templating system. They talk about the structure of the themes and how to create your own inside it. There's even parts detailing the specific sections (like the header, the posts section and the sidebars).

Vinu Thomas has linked to an article from Micah Carrick talking about the customization of the gedit IDE to be more useful for web developers.

As a web developer and programmer, I prefer to use a powerful text editor over WYSIWYG software. I write code using HTML/XHTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, Ruby, etc. The standard text editor that comes with GNOME is much more powerful than you may know. This article is written to illustrate how you can configure gedit for use as a powerful, stable web developer's text editor.

The article is broken up into a few different sections - a list of the features the gedit has to offer, some of the preferences that you can customize, a description of the plugin system and a listing of some of the external tools (plugins) that can be added for additional functionality.

On PHPKitchen today, Demian Turner has posted this interesting item about an improved "PHP shell" that has been developed by Jan Kneschke.

You can check out the details here or just download the files directly from here

As promised in Part One of How To Customize WordPress, this time I thought I would attempt to see how simple it can be to tweak an existing WordPress template using some CSS.

A lot of the more frequently used existing blog templates have only a 2 Column design, and are quite narrow at that so trying to get some whitespace and an extra column into one of them is the challenge I set myself.

She talks about some tools she's using to make the changes (all cross-platform) and dives right in, using the WebDev Toolbar to locate items and their IDs to make updating them easy. From there's it's all CSS and HTML updates in the rest of this lengthy tutorial...