Slim Framework has been around for some time now and it has become my de-facto micro framework for developing small projects or even just prototyping concepts easily. I have been long looking for a good package manager for PHP that would allow me to easily load any package I want to use in my projects.

In this post I will continue from my last post about Using PHPActiveRecord with Slim Framework we will move on to creating template(views) using Twig Template Engine. Twig is written by the creator of Symfony Framework Fabien Potencier and the template syntax is easy to understand and extending Twig is also relatively easy. Before continuing any further I would advice on following the previous blog post Using PHPActiveRecord with Slim Framework or if you are not interested in learning about PHPActiveRecord you can download the files from the GitHub repository.

When prototyping projects in PHP I normally use Slim Framework and for all database interactions I use PHPActiveRecord. These tools make Rapid Application Prototyping quick and easy to manage. In this article I will go through step by step explaining how to get these two up and running.

After hours of trying to install MySQLdb in a virtualenv for a django app I am working on, I have finally worked out how to get it done. I was using the normal

pip install MySQL-python

command inside of my environment and this didn't work, I did multiple google searches and checked all over the internet and to no avail.

I have recently started to use microframeworks to prototype and test ideas in short sprints rather than creating a full blown web application. I will be talking about a upcoming PHP 5 Microframework called Slim Framework. Slim Framework as small as the package might be is a feature filled framework which keeps the separation between presentation and business logic.

I have now moved this website over to MODx Revolution 2.0.0. I must say the migration wasn't too difficult although I was waiting on a one click upgrade path but after looking at the way how MODx is built in general, it wouldn't have been possible as different developers use different plugins, snippets and addons. I was reading Muddy Dog Paws and realized he was having problems getting Flickr to work in MODx Revolution.

With MODx Revolution 2.0.0 hitting RC3 it is not long before the final version is released. I took some interest in Revolution from the time it hit RC2 and have been working on a internal project with it. I wanted to manage a few internal websites with it so I put it to the test to see how easy it would be to do this.

When working with Arrays there are normally a few tasks that you tend to repeat and the functions are not that evident from the names alone. I created a helper object which allows you to convert a JSON string to objects and store them into a array.

When developing applications for Facebook there are a few pitfall that every developer should know about:

When creating a plugin for any open source system it is always good to check if what you have in mind is already created and also a good starting point is to check out other plugins already made for the system. My first Frog CMS plugin came about while browsing the forum and seeing a discussion about tags. The original plugin was created by someone else but in its early stage I joined in the thread and improved on what was originally created. In the end Tagger was the product of the that thread.