Mar
10
PHP, Symfony, Magento

Welcome back to all of you who have missed me for the past 11 months :-)

I have done a few things - my house is now liveable (in the basement), and I have a GST # and a few clients. I am now working on a couple of proposed projects - I need to spend some time up front so that I have a demo to show them.

1) Magento - a free (to start with) e-commerce php package. Setting up at http://www.northcreek.ca/store, this will be a development web store. We'll see how far Magento can go.

2) Symfony - a PHP library that helps build web apps quickly and cleanly. I want to build a music management app for Onoway Baptist Church, where I am the worship leader, and possibly soon the webmaster. Symfony gives me a good starting point.

So why PHP? Well, I have a hosted server with GoDaddy (that you are reading this on), and they support PHP, not perl, java, ruby, or others. No root access. So I'll go as far as I can with this setup, then move to a java-supported server setup when required. In the meantime, I've installed the Entropy.ch php package from Marc Lyanage (www.entropy.ch) on my laptop, so that I can develop using php and mysql at home.

I will try to keep things updated - I'm currently on Day 3 of the Symfony trial. Lots of configuration headaches due to my laptop. However, with very little description of a model, I now have a database and a website that edits the database. Hooray for modern web frameworks, even in PHP! :-)

Categories: Software