Understanding Doctrine’s NestedSet feature

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The Doctrine library comes with a feature called nested set, which makes saving trees in a database easy. However, it’s quite easy to accidentally cause a lot of extra unneeded queries if not being careful. Here are some pointers to keep in mind while working with the nested set, and some example queries to make understanding it easier.

Database helper for PHPUnit

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When testing code which uses the database, you would usually want to make sure the database stays pristine for each test – All tables should be empty, as any extra data could interfere with the tests. You could probably write an extended Testcase class which automatically does this before each test in setUp and afterwards in tearDown, but it may …

How I got into programming

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While browsing around some old files on my computer, I came across some old files from 1998 (I think): An old text-game by some of my elementary school friends. It reminded me of how I got started in programming. It was probably when I was 11 or 12 years old, when a friend told me about a text adventure game …

Zend_Form decorator tips

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It seems a lot of people are struggling with Zend_Form decorators. They want to know how to modify the markup, but they can’t figure out how to do it with the bundled decorators or how to write their own. Since I’ve done some decorator-stuff myself, I thought I’d share some tips on making the output a bit nicer. For example, …

PRADO: PHP goes ASP.NET (ish)

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Lately, I’ve been checking out PRADO, which is “a component-based and event-driven programming framework for developing Web applications in PHP 5”. What that actually means is that you can use components, such as a data grid or a button, and work with them based on events without having to think about the traditional things associated with such: Parsing out POST …

View inheritance and “blocks” in Zend_View

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Some frameworks like Django and PRADO have the concept of view inheritance, or a “master page” like in ASP.NET. Essentially it’s a similar idea as Zend_Layout is in Zend Framework, but the difference is that you can define the master/parent view inside the view itself. For example, in Django {% extends “base.html” %} would make the current template extend “base.html”, …