A few days into learning Symfony and so far I'm keen on

• configuration check to start with
• good MVC separation
• ability to generate initial MVC components from a database definition
• form validation to match database constraints
• wrapping various HTTP functions and globals in a request and response object
• separate dev and prod environments
• ajax integration - like defining a div as draggable in PHP
• explicit support for initial and test data

Things not to like

Well having found the Definitive Guide to Symfony a bit uninspiring I've spent a bit of time on the "Practical Symfony" book - online.

http://www.symfony-project.org/jobeet/1_2/Propel/en/

So far it's great - the first "three days" lessons went by pretty quick, and I'm glad I'd done some background reading.

Putting the two things together I feel I've probably got enough understanding  to start writing a basic app - which is exactly what I need to do to make sense of a load of reading.

An interesting post from Lullabot today on problems with Drupal's Schema API and the Twitpocalypse

It turns out that the Schema API doesn't properly understand the difference between different types of integers 

CSS revolutionised web development, <font> and <table> were a nightmare in comparison.

But still there are times when CSS feels very limited, if you want to change a colour or margin size and have to hunt through the CSS to calculate the related changes.

But now there is

http://lesscss.org/

Which looks like it fills in some of the missing gaps - it extends the CSS syntax and to it's own format - and then generates standard CSS from this.

I'm definitely planning on using this for my next project. 

I've written a patch for Drupal 7 to enable date and time data types to be defined for the schema API.

http://drupal.org/node/200953

There seems to be some resistance to this idea due to concerns about compatibility between database versions (Drupal now supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and sqlite).

Personally I don't think Drupal can afford to work at lowest common denominator level if the aim is to be a serious option for the enterprise

I've just been checking out the latest development version of Drupal 7 to see what this latest release will offer.

The official notes for the release are here:  http://drupal.org/node/156281

It seems like the main user visible changes are improvements to the user interface for creating new pages.

I've created a screencast of Drupal 7 in action 

This module makes it possible to customise the title of the pages which add nodes to Drupal site.

By default these pages have the title "Create a $node_type"

This module was paid for by http://www.consultanddesign.com/ who have asked for it to be contributed back to the community. I'm in the process of applying for a CVS account to do that properly, in the meantime here's the code.

<?php

/**
* Implementation of hook_form_alter
*
* This contains two cases.
*
* For the form that edits node types it adds a field to record an additional title.
*

I had fun this weekend at the PHP London Test Fest, it was a great opportunity to learn something new and meet some great programmers.