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The release of the new Yahoo! Bookmarks beta has been on a number of news portals lately. Yahoo! Bookmarks has 20 million users, and is available in 12 languages (and counting). But the exciting news about the new Yahoo! Bookmarks is that it was built with Symfony.

Michael Salisbury, Technical Yahoo!, explained the reasons why Symfony was chosen over competing frameworks:

• - Great documentation
• - Explicit and extensive configurability
• - Active development
• - Use of best-of-breed components rather than building everything again

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DPS are New Zealand’s biggest player in the payments gateway business. They’ve been around for as long as I’ve been building E-Commerce sites which must be at least 6 or 7 years now.

Their main service for handling card processing on sites is Payment Express, or PX. It’s been through a number of different incarnations over time, from requiring a proxy daemon (running on the hosting server itself) in the old days to now having a clean web service interface.

DPS have always provided excellent documentation, but their example code for PHP only covered the most basic situations and wasn’t easily reusable. I had always intended to publish some interface code ‘once it was good enough’ and since this class is being used on a dozen or so sites now, it must be the right time.

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Serving secure pages on a website is made a lot easier by having both your secure and insecure pages served by the same files - all you need to do is change the scheme from http:// to https:// and you’re done. But how do you manage which pages should redirect to the secure server? And how do you make sure you redirect users back when they’re finished submitting sensitive information?

The answer again is in Symfony’s filter framework, which can be used to automatically monitor whether your requests should change scheme, and redirect when needed.

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A confession: it’s been over a year since I wrote this bit of code, with the intention of making it available to all and sundry. Clearly I haven’t had quite the time that was required to build a page and post it up on the web somewhere, but now I’ve got this blog going again I may as well put it here.

PHPCheck is a simple script which checks the PHP environment it’s running under for a set of minimum requirements defined in a configuration file. It’s ideal for use in installers but could easily be executed at run-time for any other software to ensure the environment hasn’t changed since it was last checked.

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Every so often I need to password protect a web project so that only other developers or the client can access the site. I could build a user authentication system into the project itself, but that’d be overkill considering it won’t be used during the production life of the site. This leaves the classic old-school option of HTTP Authentication. This has it’s own issues to solve though: whilst it’s reasonably straightforward to add in .htaccess configured authentication on servers you’re familiar with, it’s somewhat harder to set up if you don’t know the path to your password file in advance.

The alternative is to implement HTTP Auth in your Symfony project itself. Thankfully Symfony’s filter architecture makes this as simple as editing three files.

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