Plugin installation failed: No valid packages found

Well, I am still exploring symfony and its many interesting options. One of the features that really appeals to me is the ability to secure certain actions (e.g. "create", "save") for a given module (e.g. "user" module, "group" module) using user credentials (e.g. "admin", "guest"). The only catch is that this inbuilt mechanism doesn't provide login per se which means you can set credentials, but have to create the login process yourself. The most obvious way to avoid this is simply to install the sfGuardPlugin plugin for symfony.

I typed the installation command but came across the following:


cmd>> symfony plugin:install sfGuardPlugin

>> plugin installing plugin "sfGuardPlugin"
>> sfPearFrontendPlugin downloading sfGuardPlugin-3.0.0.tgz ...
>> sfPearFrontendPlugin Starting to download sfGuardPlugin-3.0.0.tgz (18,752 bytes)
>> sfPearFrontendPlugin .
>> sfPearFrontendPlugin .
>> sfPearFrontendPlugin .
>> sfPearFrontendPlugin ...done: 18,752 bytes
>> sfPearFrontendPlugin symfony-plugins/sfGuardPlugin requires package
>> sfPearFrontendPlugin "symfony/symfony" (version >= 1.2.0, version <= 1.3.0,
>> sfPearFrontendPlugin excluded versions: 1.3.0), installed version is 1.1.4

Plugin "sfGuardPlugin" installation failed: No valid packages found


The problem here was simply that the latest version of the package was being used. That particular version (3.0.0) is meant for symfony 1.2 which is still being developed. Since I am using the latest stable release of symfony (1.1.4), the trick is simply to specify which release to install. To work this out, simply check out the sfGuardPlugin changelog page to find the correct release version number (2.2.0).


cmd>> symfony plugin:install sfGuardPlugin --release=2.2.0


And hey presto, it worked! Excellent. More on symfony soon...

Thoughts in the meantime?

Adobe Flash 10 released

It looks like it's "sniffer-update" time again... quite a few sites seem to have 'broken' with this new release, at least in Internet Explorer.

Here's a quick way of detecting the Flash version using ActiveXObject:


function testFlashIE() {
var flashMajor=0;
var flashInstalled=false;
try {
flAXO = new ActiveXObject("ShockwaveFlash.ShockwaveFlash");
flVersion = flAXO.GetVariable("$version");
flMajor = flVersion.substring(
flVersion.indexOf(" ")+1,
flVersion.indexOf(","));
flashInstalled=true;
flashMajor=flMajor;
}
catch (e) {} // ignore

if (!flashMajor) {
// here comes the usual flash detection loop
// for older versions
// ...
}

return flashInstalled?flashMajor:null;
}


Thoughts?

PHP Development Frameworks

As mentioned in a couple of previous posts (here and here), I have been looking into symfony as a PHP Framework solution and it's certainly one of the most comprehensive on the market. The following article at PHPit compares ten well-known PHP development frameworks including Zend, cakePHP and symfony.

Although the article is most probably outdated where facts are concerned (with comments dating back to 2006), most of the criteria on which the comparison is built are still very much up-to-date. They cover inbuilt support for: PHP5, Model-View-Controller (MVC), Object Relational Mapping (ORM), Caching, Validation and filtering, Ajax, Authentication, and more.

Still, I feel a development framework shouldn't simply boil down to supporting X or having inbuilt Y, and should in a sense embrace a wider philosophy as a whole.

Thoughts?