The Askeet Tutorial

"The Askeet Tutorial" is part of the official symfony documentation.

• symfony advent calendar day one: starting up a project
  The objective of day one is to display a page of the application in a web browser, and to setup a professional development environment. This includes installation of symfony, creation of an application, web server configuration, and setup of a source version control system.

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• symfony advent calendar day two: setting up a data model
  The objectives for the second day are to define what the final result should be in terms of functionalities, sketch the data model, and begin coding. This will include generating an object-relational mapping and using it interactively to create, retrieve and update records in a database with an application scaffolding.

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• symfony advent calendar day three: dive into the MVC architecture
  The objectives for the third day are to define a nicer layout for the site, define the list of questions as the default homepage, show the number of users interested by one question, and populate the database from sample text files in order to have test data. That's not much to do, but quite a lot to read and understand.

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• symfony advent calendar day four: refactoring
  The objectives for the fourth day are to show the list of answers to a question, to give a nice URL to the question detail page, to add a custom class, and to move some chunk of codes to a better place. This should help you understand the concepts of template, model, routing policy, and refactoring. You may think that it is too early to rewrite code that is only a few days old, but we'll see how you feel about it at the end of this tutorial.

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• symfony advent calendar day five: forms and pager
  The objectives for day five are to allow a user to login and to paginate the list of questions on the home page. This will be quick to develop, but it will allow you to recover from yesterday.

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• symfony advent calendar day six: security and form validation
  During the fifth day, you got used to manipulating templates and actions; forms and pagers have no secrets for you anymore. But after building the login form, you probably expected us to show you how to restrict access to non-authorised users for a specific set of functionalities. That's what we are going to do today, together with some form validation.

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• symfony advent calendar day seven: model and view manipulation
  Today we will display the list of last questions asked and the last answers posted, the list of users interested by a question, the profile of a user, and we will add a navigation bar on every page to access these features. Because that wouldn't be much work for an hour, we will also setup the view configuration and have a look at what has been done during this week.

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• symfony advent calendar day eight: AJAX interactions
  If the base of data manipulation in the web has long been forms, today the AJAX techniques and usability enhancements can change the way an application is built. And that counts for askeet, too. This tutorial will show you how to add AJAX-enhanced interactions to askeet. The objective is to allow a registered user to declare its interest about a question.

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• symfony advent calendar day nine: local improvements
  During, the AJAX interactions were introduced in askeet, and without pain. The application is now quite usable, but could use a lot of little improvements. Rich text should be allowed in the questions `body`, potentially long lists should be paginated, and primary keys should not appear in the URIs. All that is not difficult to put in place with symfony: today will be a good occasion to practice what you already learned, and to check that you know how to manipulate all the layers of the MVC architecture.

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• symfony advent calendar day eleven: syndication feed
  The askeet application is ready to be launched in a (early) beta stage. As a matter of fact, it could already seduce lots of users since the core features (ask questions, read answers, contribute new answers) are built. The trouble is that recurrent users will find it difficult to keep up-to-date with the latest events on the askeet website. You need to provide them with fresh news without effort, and there is a media for that: news feed. So let's add news feed to askeet today.

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• symfony advent calendar day twelve: Emails
  Symfony is not just about web pages, and today's tutorial will illustrate it again. We will send an email by taking advantage of the MVC implementation.

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• symfony advent calendar day thirteen: Tags
  Web 2.0 applications have come out with a new way of organizing items: tags. Tags are words, just as categories are. But the differences are that there is no hierarchy of tags, and that an item can have several tags. While finding a cat with categories could prove cumbersome (animal/mammal/four-legged/feline/, or other mysterious category names), it is very simple with tags (pet+cute). Add to that the ability for all users to add tags to a given question, and you get the famous concept of folksonomy.

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