Krues8dr.com

As a web developer, the greater part of my job is not creating new apps, but hacking together disparate software packages into Frankensteinian amalgamations that (supposedly) work together seamlessly.  This is universally a headache, as the original authors tend to write code thinking that their app is the only one that will be installed.  Wordpress, Vanilla, and Interspire’s Email Marketer are some of the worst offenders that I struggle with regularly.

When coding your own brilliant application, there are a few simple things you can do to avoid potential collisions and headaches later, especially if anyone else will be using your code.  Here are a few areas to pay attention to. (more…)

When we redesigned hotelicopter, I had to spend a lot of time cutting up images for a bunch of buttons and boxes. I was using the now-standard Sliding Doors technique, so that we could have flexible boxes. Today, I realized that I could combine this technique with another A List Apart favorite, image sprites, so that you can have sliding doors using only one image. (more…)

So, one us pilots was trying to use Doctrine migrations to update a database on one of our servers. However, Doctrine was sternly refusing to use the correct database, as configured in the database.yml file. As it turns out, using Symfony from the command line skips the usual route through the /web/yourapplication.php file (e.g. backend.php or frontend.php). As a result, the environment is not properly set when reading the database.yml file, and instead the last database connection specified is used. Lame. The trick is to specify the environment from the command line, so this file (and the other config files) do what they’re supposed to:


symfony doctrine:migrate --env=staging frontend 119


where “staging” is whatever the environment is you want to use (to match the name in the database.yml file).