On the Symfony blog there's a new post mentioning the availability of the static contents of the Symfony site as a public repository.

The Symfony website has always been in English as English is probably the lingua-franca for web developers. But as some sections of the website do not change that frequently (mainly the "What is Symfony?", "Get started", and "About" sections), and because not all developers are comfortable reading English websites, I'm very happy to announce that most of the static contents are now available in a public Git repository.

They've already had people contributing back to the documentation in their own languages including German, Slovak, Czech, Swedish and Polish. Some of them are still works in progress, but they're getting there.

Composer has changed how PHP developers work with external libraries and packages in even just the small amount of time its been around. One of the keys to its use, though, is getting your code listed on the Packagist site for easy requesting. In this new tutorial on PHPMaster.com, they walk you through doing just that.

You've created an awesome library, and now you're ready to open source it and share it with the world. Hopefully someone else can benefit from your work, and maybe you'll even receive a bug report or patch to make the library even better. But none of that can happen unless people can find it… and the modern way is increasingly becoming through Composer and Packagist. In this article I'll show you what information is needed in your composer.json file and how to list your library on Packagist so others can easily find it.

He talks some about the "composer.json" file for your project and talks some about the content that has to be there for Packagist to be able to pick it up correctly. He then shows you how to go over to the Packagist website, log in and add a package to their repository. It then shows you where on Github you'll need to go to set up a Service Hook to talk back to Packagist when a new version is deployed.

Vikram Vaswani passed on a link to a recording of a webcast the folks over at Liip did about using the PHPCR (content repository for PHP) along with the Magnolia CMS.

PHPCR enables developers to use Magnolia CMS within a PHP application. Common scenarios include editing Magnolia CMS pages and creating or updating CMS page properties through a PHP front-end. With PHPCR and the PHP Jackalope implementation, PHP developers can interface with Jackrabbit, the JCR implementation in Magnolia CMS and can connect their Web applications with Magnolia CMS without any special Java training or knowledge.

You'll need to register to view the webinar, but it's an interesting look at integrating this (PHPCR) with a major system to house its content.

According to this new post on the main PHP-GTK project's website, they've officially made the move over to github:

Although the main PHP-GTK site at http://gtk.php.net/ does not (yet ?) make mention of it, development of PHP-GTK is still active, but is using a more recent infrastructure, having moved to Github like many other projects.

You can find this new repository at https://github.com/php/php-gtk-src. The PHP-GTK project is an extension for the PHP programming language that implements language bindings for GTK+. It provides an object-oriented interface to GTK+ classes and functions and greatly simplifies writing client-side cross-platform GUI applications.

In this new post to his blog Henri Bergius shows you how to run the Symfony CMF with Midgard2 content repository.

I've written about Decoupled Content Management before. As the Symfony Live event in Paris is nearing, I thought to give Symfony CMF a spin. Symfony CMF is a new approach at building PHP content management systems, and adheres quite well to the principles of decoupled CMS.

He helps you set up the needed dependencies and content schemas as well as the YML configuration you'll need to set up to get the content repository backend working and integrated. Some command line calls are included to "prime" the database and the application should be ready to go.

Klaus Silveira has submitted a project he's been working on to make browsing through git repositories a bit simpler with a local tool - gitlist.

GitList is an elegant and modern web interface for interacting with multiple git repositories. It allows you to browse repositories using your favorite browser, viewing files under different revisions, commit history, diffs. It also generates RSS feeds for each repository, allowing you to stay up-to-date with the latest changes anytime, anywhere. GitList was written in PHP, on top of the Silex microframework and powered by the Twig template engine. This means that GitList is easy to install and easy to customize. Also, the GitList gorgeous interface was made possible due to Bootstrap.

Since it's just a PHP-based application, installing it is as easy as cloning the source to a web-accessible directory and setting up a "config.ini" file with your settings. You can find out more about this project based on the popular Silex microframework on its GitHub page.

On PHPMaster.com today they have a new tutorial focusing on using the Repository (a part of the domain driven design architecture) to enhance your model's current functionality.

Unlike mappers, though, which are part of the infrastructure, a repository characterizes itself as speaking the model's language, as it's intimately bound to it. And because of its implicit dependency on the mappers, it preserves the persistence ignorance as well, therefore providing a higher level of data abstraction, much closer to the domain objects.

Included in the tutorial is the full code you'll need to create a simple UserInterface class and a User model that extends it. He also makes a UserCollection class to handle working with multiple User objects and a UserMapper to handle the actual data source fetching. Finally, he implements the Repository on top of this base structure showing how it lays on top of everything via the UserMapperInterface instance. At the end some example code showing it in use is also included - making the PDO connection, creating the UserRepository and fetching by a few different data types (email, name and role).

In this new post to his blog Johannes Schlüter shows you how to easily set up a development environment for the recently moved PHP repositories (to git) using "out of tree" builds to keep versions and configurations separate.

As PHP has moved to git recently everybody who works on the PHP source has to recreate his work environment. When working on PHP I have a few requirements for my working dirs. For one I want to be able to use different branches (like 5.3, 5.4 and master) at the same time and I want to quickly test different PHP configurations, like builds using thread-safety or debug mode on or off.

He includes a set of commands you can use to to clone the new repository and create different working directories for the different kinds of builds that you want to install. He also points out as a shell script on github.

On DZone.com John Esposito has a new post sharing two Symfony2 bundle repositories you can look to to improve your development experience with the framework - KnpBundles and Symfohub.

If you're using Symfony2, you already know that the framework uses 'bundles', the equivalent of plugins, if the core counted as a plugin too. (The official documentation calls bundles 'first-class citizens' in Symfony2.) So far so great idea, but an ecosystem depends on a community, and a community needs some kind of organization. So how is the Symfony2 bundle community organized, and how do you find existing third-party bundles?

KnpBundles provides a larger resource than Symfohub, but both have handy features to help you find what you're looking for - filtering, search recommendations and rankings.

PHPBuilder.com has a new tutorial posted about interfacing with GitHub in PHP, using their API to hook into and pull down information about users and repositories.

The Git-based project hosting service GitHub is certainly the belle of today's technology ball, having attracted more than 1 million registered users and amassed more than 2 million hosted projects in less than three years. [...] GitHub High Scores and GitHub Badges are two examples of third-party services created using the GitHub API, which is capable of carrying out any task you might wish to perform via GitHub.com. With it you can create, edit and search repositories, learn more about fellow GitHub users, and manage repository issues.

Jason shows how to use the php-github-api library to connect to the API, search repository information, get user details, finding their repositories and accessing restricted resources (things only available for the authenticated user like updating your account or working with your own repositories).