Finally! We finally managed to catch up and prepare a new version of our Symfony plugin to generate nice admin generator based on jQuery UI Themes.

We tagged this version as 0.2.0 since we still consider this plugin as beta version (but usable on production) but the big news is the support of symfony 1.4! For this specific support I must thank you 2 people that submited 2 patches to make this compatibility possible. Thanks to ( jtexier , “merci Jerome ”) and dalexandre and of course I must named jeremyb for his dedication to the project, he did most of the latest development.

I also setup a live demo to allow you to play a little bit with the plugin. It is currently basic but we will add more stuff step by step.

What’s new:

• Theme switcher integrated
• user interface fixes and enhancements
• Symfony 1.4 compatibility

You can have some more details on my previous post.

The plugin is available as usual on github, I will publish as well the packaged plugin on symfony website.

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As I am working for a university, we have recently migrate all our staff to use Google Apps for Education and we plan to move all our students and alumni too later this year. Google Apps for Education is really a great tool (and free for us , most of our users are really happy of the switch: it is reliable, fast and have so many collaborative features. Bye bye Outlook , welcome to the Cloud
The Education package is the same as the Business package, including API and a lot of good stuff. The online Google Apps tools to manage users and groups is easy and simple but quickly become too simple to use when you are dealing with thousands of users, you then need to develop your own tool to maximize your daily operation. The “official” PHP5 Google Apps library is GData from the Zend Framework, which make it a breeze to integrate it with Symfony.

a view of an admin generator with Google Apps account management (using sfAdminThemejRollerPlugin):

We are currently redeveloping our University Management System based on Symfony 1.2 and we plan to integrate most of our applications with symfony too, including a research project on a new social learning platform.

I developed a Symfony task (sf1.2+Doctrine) that take a csv file and create your local sfGuardUser as well as the corresponding Google apps accounts. The Google accounts creation is optional so the task can be used for a normal batch user creation with Symfony alone. A simple:

./symfony guard:batch-create-user your.csv --googleapps=yourdomain.com

…will do the trick for you! I am not sure whether publishing the source code might be interesting for others (the Google API is only available for Premier and Education customers)…let me know. We will eventually publish our University management system as an open source project later for sure.

Here is a list of issues and recommendations while dealing with Google Apps Provisioning API:

• Google Apps API error reporting: when you have an error while dealing with Google Apps API, errors messages are useless, you always get a ’server errors’ message without more details, it is then very difficult to debug your code to find the issue.
• Don’t forget some of the basic Google Apps rules for account creation such as a password with minimum 6 characters otherwise you get back one of those unmeaning-full error message.
• sfGuard is using sha1 as the default encryption method but it adds a grain of ’salt’ on it therefore you cannot send to Google Apps the correct sha1 password. I had to overwrite the default setPassword() and checkPassword() to simply remove the use of the salt and make sure my password synchronization with Google Apps can work. I am not sure if it is a huge security concern though, any idea? Beside this you can also use md5 for your password but you will not be able to use another algorithm since Google Apps is only accepting sha1 and md5.

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I finally found some time to add new stuff on the unpronounceable plugin, and thanks to some new contributors more are to come (thanks JeremyB . Here is the list of change:

• As I mentioned in my previous post, I add a new config field named ‘show‘ for the admin generator. I guess the meaning of this new option is quite obvious, isn’t it? It adds the possibility to simply view one object details without editing it. It currently shows the list of fields like it is for the ‘edit’ view, meaning with a tab interface.
  
• UI improvements (done by jeremyb): as you can see in the 2 screenshots below there are many improvements such as the new ‘reset’ button next to the filter button, the sort arrows, new css styles for object actions, new pager view and finally the batch action select box is now also supporting the theme roller

The top part looks like this:

…and the bottom part:

the edit view:

The current code is available in github only. It is not yet ready for a new plugin release, we are still missing some key elements.

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I have finally released a new version of this plugin with an unpronounceable name Here is the list of change:

• I add a new field named ’show’ for the admin generator. I guess the meaning of this new option is quite obvious, isn’t it? It add the possibility to simply view one object details without editing it. It currently shows the list of fields like it is for the ‘edit’ view, meaning with a tab interface.
• I also create a new class jRollerDoctrineGenerator to replace sfDoctrineGenerator if you want the default link (the one you create with the = sign before the field name in the generator.yml) to link to the ’show’ view rather than by default going to the ‘edit’ view. So far this is the only added value of this class. Of course if you prefer to keep the link to the ‘edit’ view simply keep the default class sfDoctrineGenerator. To use it, you simply need to modify your generator.yml as followed:

generator:
  class:     jRollerDoctrineGenerator
  params:
    theme:   jroller
....

The source code is available on github for the moment (http://github.com/gestadieu/sfAdminThemejRollerPlugin/tree/master), I want to finalize a few things before packaging a new plugin version. I also need to put the source code on svn.

• 3 Comments