On the Symfony blog there's a post covering some of the recent improvements in the framework that can help to make creating and updating Symfony projects faster via some recent changes speeding up the Composer installation.

A few years ago, we introduced the Symfony Installer as the fastest way to create new Symfony projects. While Composer took up to several minutes to create a new project, Symfony Installer did the same in less than ten seconds.

The trick was that the installer downloaded a ZIP archive with all the dependencies required by the specific Symfony version you were installing, so it was not necessary that Composer resolved the project dependencies.

However, with the release of Symfony 4 we deprecated the Symfony Installer in favor of Composer, because we wanted to use standard development tools as much as possible. Sadly this made creating new Symfony projects slower and, in some cases, it triggered "out of memory" exceptions while Composer was resolving the dependencies.

The post talks about the changes they made to the Composer installation process, mentioning the two major changes: including a composer.lock to prevent version resolution and removal of all legacy Composer tags. They also share some benchmarks for the installation both before and after the changes showing a jump of at least ten seconds post-changes.

In a post to his site Robert Basic has shared some helpful plugins for PHP developers using Vim as their primary editor. These plugins not only help you jump around in your code but get more context on where you're at.

One thing I was missing for a long time in Vim is to be able to "jump to definition" in an easy and painless way. The other thing I wanted to improve is to be able to tell easily where am I actually in the code base; to see the current class and method name of wherever the cursor was.

With a bit of googling and poking around, I finally came up with a perfect combo of 5 plugins (yep, five!) that enables me to do both, and a little bit of extra.

He shows examples of using three different things he wanted to be able to do when working in his code and the plugins that satisfy each:

• Generating and managing tag files for the code (Gutentags)
• Jumping around to definitions (CtrlP)
• Providing context on the current class and method name (tagbar+tagbar-phpctags+lightline and phpctags

One line examples are included showing how to configure them with your current Vim use.

A while back the PHPClasses.org website announced that it would be changing its look a bit and allowing visitors to set up and configure their own look and feel as they chose. The editor to make these changes has finally been released and is ready for use.

The site is launching an editor that allows designs to propose new site design themes. This is the initial beta version of the site design editor, but it already allows any designer to try different presentation designs.

You can access the editor from here and it'll require a login to get in (to create your own custom layout). The system uses simple tag-based templating to wrap the content of the site in your look/feel of choice. You can even try it out on different sized resolutions to give you an idea of the template's flexibility.

The HowTo Forge website has posted the first part in a new series of tutorials to help people (programmers and non) to get into PHP and be comfortable working with it.

This first part starts from the base they've already set (installation/configuration) and actually gets into the code.

This article is the first of a series of PHP guides that aim at teaching you the basics of PHP programming. By now, I hope you would have set up your system to start actual PHP programming. Lets start PHP programming.

They keep things simple and look at topics like:

• What are tags?
• Web Page Parsing
• Operators and Operands
• Variables

The HowTo Forge website has posted the first part in a new series of tutorials to help people (programmers and non) to get into PHP and be comfortable working with it.

This first part starts from the base they've already set (installation/configuration) and actually gets into the code.

This article is the first of a series of PHP guides that aim at teaching you the basics of PHP programming. By now, I hope you would have set up your system to start actual PHP programming. Lets start PHP programming.

They keep things simple and look at topics like:

• What are tags?
• Web Page Parsing
• Operators and Operands
• Variables

Joshua Eichorn shares some of the updates to the phpDocumentor software in his latest post today:

As PHP keeps added language features one of the things we have to do is figure out how to document them. Lately I've been hearing requests for a way to document virtual properties and methods on classes that are implemented using __call etc.

After talking a bit with Greg, I'm leaning towards adding in some new docblock tags to classes to allow these methods/properties to be documented.

He includes a code example for the documentation method suggested on these new functionality bits. He also asks for comments/ideas on how to hald these sorts of updates in the future.

Joshua Eichorn shares some of the updates to the phpDocumentor software in his latest post today:

As PHP keeps added language features one of the things we have to do is figure out how to document them. Lately I've been hearing requests for a way to document virtual properties and methods on classes that are implemented using __call etc.

After talking a bit with Greg, I'm leaning towards adding in some new docblock tags to classes to allow these methods/properties to be documented.

He includes a code example for the documentation method suggested on these new functionality bits. He also asks for comments/ideas on how to hald these sorts of updates in the future.

On the Cake Baker blog today, Daniel Hofstetter shows us how to update the contents of multiple div tags with a little help from Ajax:

This is a question which arises from time to time in the CakePHP google group. There is an example in the group, but I have to admit I didn't understood it the first time I read it. So I try to provide a better example.

His example creates a view with the Ajax link and two divs inside to update - our containers. Next up is the controller, a simple matter of four lines to set which layout to use. And, lastly, they create another view, one to handle the actual updates to the two divs previously created. Using it is as simple as clicking on the link in the first view, populating the two divs with new information.

Be sure to check out the comments for other helpful hints and bug information (with Firefox).

On the Cake Baker blog today, Daniel Hofstetter shows us how to update the contents of multiple div tags with a little help from Ajax:

This is a question which arises from time to time in the CakePHP google group. There is an example in the group, but I have to admit I didn't understood it the first time I read it. So I try to provide a better example.

His example creates a view with the Ajax link and two divs inside to update - our containers. Next up is the controller, a simple matter of four lines to set which layout to use. And, lastly, they create another view, one to handle the actual updates to the two divs previously created. Using it is as simple as clicking on the link in the first view, populating the two divs with new information.

Be sure to check out the comments for other helpful hints and bug information (with Firefox).

Trying to find the HTML errors in a complex layout on a page can get very frustrating (especially when it repeats elements generated by backend scripts). Scott Johnson had one such instance, so he wrote a little script to help with it.

He has the source of the script included in the post as well as two examples of using it with msn.com and news.com. Other suggestions of tools to help with these problems are listed in the comments - the View Rendered Source Firefox extension, and the HTML Validator for Firefox.