You will discover how easy it is to integrate a third-party ORM library with DooPHP, and you should be able to use this as a model to integrate other libraries with your DooPHP project.

Step 1 – Directory structure

In DooPHP, all code should go into a ‘protected’ directory. This can be held within or outside your normal web path. I normally create it within my web path but protect the directory through .htaccess or Nginx configuration.

Next, you create a directory called protected/orm – all your Propel configuration goes in there.

Step 2 – build.properties

You will need to define a build.properties file in the orm directory. I presume you know how to create Propel configuration and schema files as this tutorial only concentrates on making Propel work with DooPHP.

The important parts of build.properties for this tutorial are as follows:

propel.project = my_propel_project
propel.output.dir = ${propel.project.dir}/../model/propel
propel.php.dir = ${propel.output.dir}/classes
propel.phpconf.dir = ${propel.output.dir}/conf
propel.sql.dir = ${propel.project.dir}/sql

This will ensure the classes themselves go into a directory calles protected/model/propel so you can easily keep them apart from your own DooPHP models, whilst the generated SQL goes into protected/orm/sql.

Step 3 – Set default Propel configuration options

Define the path to Propel runtime as well as the name of the project in your protected/config/common.conf.php file:

$config['propel_path'] = $config['SITE_PATH'] . 'protected/class/propel-runtime-1.6/';
$config['propel_default_project'] = 'my_propel_project';

I store the Propel runtime with each individual project, in the class directory with all my other classes – but just in case I want it stored elsewhere the path is defined above.

Where does the Propel Default Project name come from? It’s taken from the “propel.project = my_propel_project” configuration in build.properties in Step 2 above.

Step 4 – Create a Propel loader class

Store this as protected/class/InitPropel.php:

<?php
/*
 * Copyright (C) 2011 I B Resources. All rights reserved.
 * Released for use in any personal or commercial project.
 * No attribution required, but link to
 * http://www.ibresources.com/ would be appreciated.
 */

// Include the main Propel script
require_once(Doo::conf()->propel_path . 'Propel.php');

class InitPropel {

  static $_propelLoaded = false;

  /**
   *
   * Initialise Propel
   *
   * Format:
   *   InitPropel::init();
   *
   * @static
   * @return bool
   */
  static public function init($dataSource = null) {

    if (self::$_propelLoaded) {
      return false;
    }

    if (!Propel::isInit()) {
      // Initialize Propel with the runtime configuration
      Propel::init(Doo::conf()->SITE_PATH . "protected/model/propel/conf/{$dataSource}-conf.php");
      set_include_path(Doo::conf()->SITE_PATH . "protected/model/propel/classes/" . PATH_SEPARATOR . get_include_path());
    }
    self::$_propelLoaded = true;
    return true;
  }

}

InitPropel::init(Doo::conf()->propel_default_project);

Step 5 – Call it in your code

Using Propel now becomes very easy. Just call the class in your controller:

class AdminController {

  public function listUsers() {
    Doo::loadClass('InitPropel');

    // Next bit assumes you have a 'user' table definition, of course!
    $users = UserQuery::create()
               ->find();
  }

}

You can also load the class in beforeRun so you don’t have to call it in every function in your controller.

There’s lots of articles available on how to set up each of these, but I thought for now I’ll just make a statement on what the best server setup is, then I’ll expand on my own setup in later articles.

Webserver: Nginx – incredibly fast, simply blows Apache out of the water.

PHP: v5.3.6 in PHP-FPM mode, with APC.

Front-End Cache: Varnish – will speed up serving your website incredibly, which will help the visitor experience and help boost your search engine ranking.

CMS: WordPress – yes, that old favourite. Make sure you use the plugin W3 Total Cache which can also refresh  Varnish for you.

Ok, that was just a quick list. Later there will be a short tutorial explaining the setup of these.

It’s the Suffusion WordPress Theme.

When you create a WordPress site, it’s important to get a proper theme up, or something you can get started with but gives you lots of flexibility later.

I looked at Thesis, Genesis and Headway – and they are all great. But, of course, they cost a bit of money.

No, don’t misunderstand me. If you got cash to splash, I’d recommend either Thesis or Genesis as they are both great themes, and give you a lot of flexibility. But you should also consider the Suffusion WordPress Theme. If you’re a novice it might not be suitable, as it’s very, very flexible and have a LOT of options. The author even shows, in big letters, “DON’T PANIC” on the theme settings page.

But if you have any clue about WordPress and have looked into themes in the past, you could do a lot worse than giving some thoughts to using Suffusion on your site.

It has a few very useful Social Media widgets, comes with 17 pre-defined color schemes, has lots of different page layouts and generally does everything you’ll need. It has more predefined widgets areas than you can fill with widgets, just take a look at the graphic on the right!

Best of all? It’s 100% free, and can be downloaded directly from the WordPress site using the Theme Manager within WordPress itself.