Future of Web Design London 2010: My thoughts two months on…

Self-review, Inspiration, Service Improvements and Personal Growth

Technology conferences are fun, an enormous amount of extremely geeky fun. Most folks can’t wait to get home and blog about all the wonderful things they’ve seen, heard and learnt over the duration of the conference. Those reviews are great insights into what works and what doesn’t, but are they an accurate reflection of the long-term benefits web industry professionals can gain from attending conferences?

Two months on and I’m still reeling from my single day experience of the Future of Web Design Conference. I shared a ticket with colleague and so attended the party & second day of the conference, having the chance to meet some awesome people and learn a great deal. I highly recommend attending the FOWD conference and these are my reasons why.

Jul 10

Snippet: Magento – Using OR and LEFT JOIN in addAttributeToFilter

Filtering product collections in Magento using addAttributeToFilter

I’m still pretty new to Magento, and am learning more about it every day. I’ve been trying to learn all I can about internals such as managing collections & recently stumbled on trying to filter a collection by two attributes. I wanted to build a list of all products that had one OR another attribute set to certain values.

Jul 10

Snippet: Symfony & Propel – Queries with SQL functions

Selecting by month and year for archives

This is a super short snippet that I ALWAYS forget how to do! Often I want to build more complex where clauses with Propel Criteria which use SQL functions such as UCASE, LCASE, LEN and the date functions DAY, MONTH and YEAR. This is possible using Propel & Criteria, but how to do it is not immediately obvious.

The snippet below shows how to select objects from the database which were created in a specific month and year. Using Criteria::CUSTOM, it’s possible to specify a column and a comparison to do with that column. This is quite useful for doing things like building archive lists.

1 2	$c->add(MyObjPeer::CREATED_AT, 'MONTH('.MyObjPeer::CREATED_AT.')='. $month, Criteria::CUSTOM); $c->addAnd(MyObjPeer::CREATED_AT, 'YEAR('.MyObjPeer::CREATED_AT.')='. $year, Criteria::CUSTOM);

Jul 10

Getting Rid of Non Breaking Spaces (&nbsp)

Using regular expressions to remove white space from UTF-8 encoded content

Have you ever tried to parse, process or preg_replace some HTML? Ever tried to do it when the HTML is UTF-8 encoded? Getting rid of white space can be tricky, here’s a few tricks I’ve learned.

Jul 10

Snippet: Symfony Forms – Accessing the Object in a Form

Symfony Forms, ORMs and Objects

Perusing my Google Analytics data shows up some interesting results. For starters the top search query which sends people to my blog is “symfony accessing object in a form”. This has been consistent for several months, but there is no article on my blog which answers that question. I imagine this must be very frustrating for people so it’s about time I added the answer here as a snippet.

Jul 10

Upgrading old WordPress installs – not as scary as you think!

Upgrade WordPress version 2.2 to 3.0

Earlier this week I received an email requesting some help with a WordPress install that had been hacked. The site was almost 3 years old and was still running WordPress 2.2. It was quite funny getting to see and play with retro WordPress again, but it had to go.

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Future of Web Design London 2010: My thoughts two months on…

Self-review, Inspiration, Service Improvements and Personal Growth

Snippet: Magento – Using OR and LEFT JOIN in addAttributeToFilter

Filtering product collections in Magento using addAttributeToFilter