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="sydphp"

Sydney PHP Group provides a community for PHP developers in Sydney, Australia.
Membership is free and open to anyone with an interest in web development.

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Do you provide web development related services in Sydney and want that information available to the Sydney PHP development community? You can reach our community by getting your RSS/ATOM feed syndicated on sydphp.org

How do I join?

Just attend a meeting, present a topic if you wish or add your thoughts to our blog

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Mailing List

The group maintains an announcement mailing list at Google Groups, used to notify members of upcoming web development events in the Sydney region

Events Calendar

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Flickr pool

BrowserSeal.BrowserPack - 10 browsers in 1 Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

I've been using IETester for years but today I stumbled upon another browser package called BrowserSeal.BrowserPack that not only includes IE5.5/6/7/8, but also IE 1/2/3/4, Opera 8/9/10, Firefox 3/3.5 and Safari 3/4. Not a bad effort! Unlike IETester which executes all the browsers in a single tabbed window, BrowserSeal.BrowserPack is really just a collection of portable browser versions, so you are left running 10 windows instead of one. What I suggest is not installing the IE browsers in BrowserSeal.BrowserPack and continue using IETester instead.

PS: And if you want to run Firebug in your 10 new browsers you can bookmark the Firebug Lite bookmarklet and you get almost the same featureset as the native firefox extension gives you!

Mid level PHP role - News Magazines Monday, March 1st, 2010

Hey Guys,
We’ve got a fulltime role coming up starting end of this month. Our
standardised stack looks like this:
Version control: SVN
IDEs: Eclipse / PDT
Standard LAMP stack.
Op code caching: APC
Memcache for sessions / result set caching
CMS: ExpressionEngine with custom module admin framework
Front-end PHP build: Zend Framework

Dynarch calendar and IE7 Friday, February 26th, 2010

OK here's one that might save you some time. I have a symfony admin gen site that works fine in all browsers but for some reason the rich calendar inputs failed to appear in IE7.

At first I thought this might have been the reason:

http://forum.symfony-project.org/index.php/m/58074/

But my calendar.js was already patched!

It turns out that you have an object in the DOM with an ID of "content" then you might find that any Dynarch calendars appear off-screen in IE7 only!

Rename your element to something else and it starts working. Don't ask me why, I can't find any reference to 'content' in the calendar script files. It's just one of those quiry things that makes you even more convinced that hating IE7 is completely justifiable!

Symfony 2 hits the streets Monday, February 22nd, 2010

It's still very early days, but Symfony 2 now has it's own site with some introductory material included. You can get the code and read about the framework - although there's no side-by-side comparison with symfony 1.4.

Now that versions 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 are all officially dead (and 1.3 being a transitional version from 1.2) it looks like 1.4 will be the last stepping stone before 2.0.

And what's so different about sf2? Well for starters it looks like every component of the symfony framework has been decoupled into what they are calling "bundles". Hmm, that sounds a bit like Zend doesn't it? Interestingly, the Zend framework is one of the core symfony 2 bundles! Whoop! I guess that means you could use the Zend MVC in place of the Symfony one, hypothetically…

Additionally, your app is a bundle, too - although I can't think of any real expedient here as I doubt your app will be of much use without the other bundles. Perhaps this allows you to easily unplug it from synfony 2 and move it somewhere else… in a parallel universe perhaps.

Ironically, the sf2 site also publishes some "hello world" benchmarks which, while impressive, are still subject to the criticisms thrown at earlier benchmark results where symfony did not do so well - hello world is not an application where a framework is useful etc. Anyway here are the stats:

For the "Hello World" application, the Symfony 2.0 is about:

* 20% faster than Solar 1.0.0beta3
* 60% faster than Lithium 0.6
* 75% faster than Yii 1.1.1
* 2 times faster than symfony 1.4.2
* 3.5 times faster than Zend 1.10
* 5.5 times faster than CakePHP 1.2.6
* 69 times faster than Flow3 1.0.0alpha7

Anyway, it doesn't look to me like symfony is getting easier, but it is definately getting better. I am particularly looking forward to the new debug toolbar:

PHP / MySQL Developer - Mid Level Friday, February 12th, 2010

We’re looking for mid-level PHP / MySQL Developer.
$65,000 - $75,000 (Negotiable)
Amplitude is a creative digital agency located in Crows Nest. We’re
looking for a talented PHP developer to join our team to work on a
range of exciting and challenging large-scale web projects. You don’t
need to be degree qualified, just experienced and good at what you

***PHP Developer*** required for 2-4 week contract with leading Global Advertising Agency- START ASAP! Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

Looking to fill a gap or bolster your portfolio of work with one of
Australia’s iconics brands?
Contact me ASAP for a confidential chat & immediate interview……if
you’re on top of your game!
Awesome day rate….up to $500 a day!!
Cheers
Jeremy Champion
M- 0433 249 725

Check your water cooling Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Do you use water cooling? Well my advice is put a calendar item to check it monthly. And run a CPU temp app at all times. You see today after 3 years of smooth sailing my reservoir ran dry, cooked my cpu and then (after I quickly refilled it) sprayed water all over the motherboard, video card and power board, killing everything and short-circuiting the entire house.

Woohoo!

Mid-level PHP Web Developer Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Leading Sydney web development company seeking talented PHP/web
developer to join our young dynamic team.
Why us?
4mation is a great place to work.
Flexible working hours and a talented, fun loving team make work life
a breeze. We’re professional & hard working but keep work life up beat
and interesting at the same time.

Zend Mail mangles email text Monday, January 18th, 2010

Had this strange problem ever since we upgraded a Symfony site from 1.0 to 1.2 - the emails being logged to the database were being mangled.

The problem turns out to be simply that the symfony 1.2 swToolkit plugin uses Zend Mail instead of phpMailer and Zend Mail spits out encoded text when you ask it for the email text or HTML contents.

So the simple fix is to wrap the data you get out of Zend Mail with the obscure quoted_printable_decode() function as shown here:

$message = quoted_printable_decode($zendEmail->getBodyHtml()->getContent());$text = quoted_printable_decode($zendEmail->getBodyText()->getContent());

There, that gets rid of all those =0D=0A characters everywhere!

Note that you would think you could avoid this simply by passing the line ending explicitly, but it does not work:

//this does *NOT* work!$message = $zendEmail->getBodyHtml()->getContent("\r\n");$text = $zendEmail->getBodyText()->getContent("\r\n");

Sendmail woes Thursday, January 14th, 2010

I have battled postfix, qmail and sendmail for years - and my latest trouble involved sendmail trying to route emails to local (non-existant) users, even though the domains in question were not in the local domains config.

After running around in config circles for a couple of hours it turns out that if you set the server's hosts to include your domains, sendmail will assume local delivery for those domains.

That is even if you have sendmail configured not to (ie: in /etc/mail/local-host-names). It even ignores your virtusertable with explicit instructions to forward mail for those domains elsewhere.

Go figure. Hope this helps someone.