NYCPHP Meetup

[Paul Houle]

    I just finished a small project with symfony at

http://spoonriveranthology.net/

    There are a lot of cool things about the site,  such as a drag and 
drop editor for relationships between people,  that are in an 
administrative interface that you can't see.

    Overall I like the symfony approach to things:  I've got slightly 
different opinions about how to configure multiple site instances,  but 
it's easy to reconcile my ideas with symfony's.

    I don't care for Propel ORM much -- in particular,  Propel doesn't 
have good mechanisms for managing schema changes...  Everything works OK 
if you never change your schema,  but adding a plug-in after you've got 
data in your database may trash your database if you follow the 
instructions.  I do like the idea,  however,  of putting my own methods 
on the ORM-generated classes.  It can be a nice way to organize code.

    Doctrine ORM ,  however,  looks like a dream.  My next symfony 
project will use Doctrine,  even though that means fewer plugins and 
builders will be available.

    Symfony's documentation is better than other PHP frameworks,  but 
it's still in a place where I needed to look at the source code often to 
understand how things ~really~ work.  That's unfortunate,  because many 
of the people who need frameworks the most are people who'd be 
intimidated by the work to make them work.