TechStrut

Joomla 1.6 Alpha 2 was recently released. Joomla is an open source content management system. Since the release of Joomla 1.5 more than a year ago, Joomla has become increasingly more popular. Joomla 1.6 will contain many new features and improvements over Joomla 1.5. One of the major changes in Joomla 1.6 is an improved ACL (Access Control List). The new ACL will provide the ability for administrators to assign specific permissions to individual content items. Read more…

The alpha version of Symfony 1.3 has been released. Improvements in Symfony 1.3 include: performance, forms, mailer and more. In the new version there is a new default mailer based on SwiftMailer 4.1. When a new application is created with the generate:app task, the security settings escaping_strategy and csrf_secret are now enabled by default. When a label is auto-generated from the field name, _id suffixes are now removed. All symfony autoloaders are now case-insensitive. PHP is case-insensitive, now so is symfony. The symfony CLI now attempts to detect the width of your terminal window and formats lines to fit. If detection is not possible the CLI defaults to 78 columns wide. Doctrine is now also the default configured ORM when creating a new project. There are many more changes and new features. Read the complete What’s new in Symfony 1.3 on the Syfomy project web site. The alpha version should not be used on production environments. Symfony 1.3 is scheduled to be released in November 2009.

I was expecting a JavaScript version of the popular ribbon to be released as soon as it made its first appearance in Microsoft Office. It’s finally here and it looks and functions just like the real thing.

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I found Paint.Net a few weeks ago when someone asked me to change the opacity of an image. Paint.Net is a free image editing tools for Windows. It has some impressive features such as support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. Best of all it’s free! Download it at Paint.Net.

A free image editing utility for windows.

Lately I have been using Microsoft Excel on a daily basis. I have mostly been working with macros but occasionally I need to do repetitive tasks. Memorizing some of the keyboard shortcuts should save me some time.  I have compiled a cheat sheet for the keyboard shortcuts using Microsoft Office help. You can download it from Microosft Excel 2007 Cheat Sheet

Just a reminder that Symfony 1.0 maintenance will end in January 2010. After this time there will be no more maintenance patches. If you are planning on migrating — Symfony 1.2 has already been released and Symfony 1.3 is scheduled to be released in November 2009. Both versions will require at least PHP version 5.2.4 so this might also be a good time to upgrade PHP as well.

There is a new Symfony 1.2 Reference Book which is available. The book is written by Symfony pioneer Fabien Potencier and was published in May 2009. The book provides a much needed reference for Symfony configuration files. It includes references for the Settings, Factories, Generator YML configuration files and many more. The book also provides a good reference for Symfony events and tasks.

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The chart below describes the upgrade path from previous version of Windows to the new Microsoft Windows 7.  Many people have complained that this chart is difficult to read. Some have called it absolutely ridiculous - since there is no upgrade path from Windows XP. I find the chart to be  an excellent reference for anyone looking to upgrade to Windows 7. Read more…

Hydration is the process used by the Symfony ORM to populate objects with the results of a database query. By making a call to the ::doSelect() method on a peer class Symfony automatically hydrates the resulting objects.  In Symfony 1.0 the hydration process was slow and it is much faster in Symfony 1.2. Still, in some cases you may want to bypass hydration. Consider a simple example. Suppose we want to get the title of some news articles.

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If you develop web sites which are used by millions of users, JavaScript performance is critical. A JavaScript intensive web site that takes a long time to load can be annoying and frustrating . Here are ten simple strategies I typically use to improve JavaScript performance.

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