create a symfony application from a drupal perspective

Creating a Symfony 2 Application from a Drupal Perspective

Robyn GreenFebruary 26, 2014

Robyn Green● Senior Developer and Themer for

Mediacurrent.

● Bachelor of Science in Journalism, Computer Science from University of Central Arkansas.

● Background in Media, news agencies.

● Web app and Front End developer since 1996.

● Live in Little Rock, Arkansas.

● Build AngularJS, XCode, Django/Python projects in my spare time.

What’s Going On?● Why we talking about Symfony?

● What does this have to do with Drupal?

● Hasn’t this been covered already?

The Fine Print● This is a high level presentation

○ There is no Symfony Apples === Drupal Oranges


○ There is no Symfony Apples === Drupal Oranges Drupal Blueberries


○ There is no Symfony Apples === Drupal Oranges Drupal Blueberries

● Won’t be going over Drupal 8

● No Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 module conversions

I solemnly swear to not rant and rave about best practices, my opinion or procedural PHP vs MVC/OOP beyond what’s required

for Symfony 2 examples.

What Will You Do?

Build a simple Symfony 2 site using Drupal terminology. (with examples … maybe)

MVCSymfony: PHP web application framework using MVC

Drupal doesn’t have any sort of strict MVC requirement.

Example: PHP and SQL queries in theme tpl files.

MVCSymfony: PHP web application framework using MVC

● M: Model● V: View● C: Controller

MVC “Drupal”Symfony: PHP web application framework using MVC

● M: Model○ Content Types

● V: View○ Theme template tpl files

● C: Controller○ Modules

Lock and (down)load

Let’s create a basic site in Symfony and Drupal

Drush vs ComposerBoth are CLI tools

You can install Drupal via Drush

You can install Symfony via Composer

Drush is 100% Drupal

Composer is a dependency manager for PHP. It owes allegiance to no one

Lock and (down)load

Lock and (down)load

We need to configure Symfony firstLoad config.php

Fix any Problems, most likely permissions

Lock and (down)load

Plug in your database information

Lock and (down)load

Lock and (down)load

Note the URL: app_dev.php

Symfony has a built-in development environment toggle that defaults to enabled.

This runs a different URL based on the environment parameter set

If You Build It, They Will Come

Basic Recipe site should have … recipes

● Title● Category● Ingredients● Instructions● Ratings. Maybe.


In Drupal, this is pretty standard*

*Field Collection and Fivestar contrib modules used


Let’s see that again, but in Symfony this time.


Building a Bundle

php app/console generate:bundle --namespace=Tutorial/CoreBundle --format=yml


Warning: Namespace Discussions Ahead


Building a Bundle


Namespaces. There are standards to how this is done and Drupal is currently using PSR-0 but heavily debating a move to PSR-4.

Symfony as of 2.4 still uses PSR-0, 1 or 2.

http://symfony.com/doc/current/contributing/code/standards.html




Building a Bundle


Tutorial here is the vendor name.CoreBundle is the package name.


Building a Bundle

php app/console generate:bundle --namespace=Recipes/WebBundle --format=yml

YAML Format. From Symfony’s own documentation:

“YAML, YAML Ain't Markup Language, is a human friendly data serialization standard for all programming languages.”


YAML

YAML

Drupal 7 Module .info


Ignore Acme - default example

We’ve got a Tutorial directory

CoreBundle falls under that

Everything related to that bundle is in here

Symfony Content Types

That’s all great, but what about our Drupal Content Type?

● We have to declare the bundle before we can generate the entity.

Don’t get confused with between Models, Entities, Bundles and Content Types.


Building an Entity

php app/console doctrine:generate:entity --entity="TutorialCoreBundle:recipe"

The console is going to ask us about fields in this entity. Let’s treat it like our content type*

*we can pass fields in the command as a shortcut, but we’ll keep it simple here.


What does this look like in Drupal?


Building an Entity

Think about relationships when deciding fields.

Ingredients is better as its own Entity, not on it’s own as a Field. We’ll establish a Many-to-Many relationship.

Categories as well.


Building an Entity

Drupal: Nodereferences, Taxonomy, even Images - anything that needs a complex set of its own fields or data is perhaps better suited as its own Entity in Symfony

We have to tell Symfony these items will have a relationship

In Drupal, the power of the community has done this for us with modules like Entity Reference and Node Reference


Building an Entity

ManyToManyOneToManyManyToOneOneToOne

These relationships are extremely powerful, and unfortunately beyond the scope of what we can cover here.


Building an Entity

What do the fields in this Entity look like?

src/Tutorial/CoreBundle/Entity/recipe.php

/** * @var string

*

* @ORM\Column(name="category", type="string", length=255)

*/

private $category;


Building an Entity

So that’s it, we have our content type minus the different relationships?

Not quite.


Building an Entity

We have to tell Symfony to update our schema:

php app/console doctrine:schema:update --force

One Data Entry to Rule Them All

Drupal


Symfony

Remember, this is just a framework.

Also, don’t do mysql inserts directly like that. It’s hard to establish relationships by hand.


$RecipeObj = new Recipe();

$RecipeObj->setTitle(“Yummy Recipe”);

$RecipeObj->setInstructions(“Some set of instructions”);

$RecipeObj->setCategory($CategoryObj);

$RecipeObj->setRating(2.5);

$em = $this->getDoctrine()->getManager();

$em->persist($RecipeObj);

$em->flush();

My First Symfony Site

How do we let Symfony know about our new bundle?

Routing

src/Tutorial/CoreBundle/Resources/routing.yml


By Default, our bundle routing looks like this: tutorial_core_homepage:

pattern: /hello/{name}

defaults: { _controller: TutorialCoreBundle:Default:index }

Which we can access here:http://localhost/symfony/web/app_dev.php/hello/test


Imagine trying to build a custom Drupal module page and not implementing hook_menu()

This is the same logic behind Symfony routing


Let’s opensrc/Tutorial/CoreBundle/Resources/routing.yml

pattern: /hello/{name}

Change To

pattern: /

We might as well set it to our homepage.


Because we’ve removed the {name} placeholder, we have to update our Controller and Twig.

src/Tutorial/CoreBundle/Controller/DefaultController.php

$recipes = $this->getDoctrine()

->getRepository(TutorialCoreBundle:recipe')

->findBy(array(), array('name' => 'asc'));

return $this->render('TutorialCoreBundle:Default:index.html.

twig',

array('recipes' => $recipes));


What did we just do?

getRepository(TutorialCoreBunder:recipe')

->findBy(array(), array('name' => 'asc'))

Is basically the same as building a View - of node.type = ‘recipe’ - sort by node.title, asc

But instead of outputting formatting or building a block, we’re just storing a collection of objects.


What did we just do?

We pass that $recipes collection on to Twig


Twig index.html.twig

● Drupal’s page.tpl.php

● We can add whatever markup we need, but no PHP

● Even better, define a base.html.twig and extend it

● Extend allows us to use all the features of the parent, but

override when necessary

{% extends 'TutorialCoreBundle:Default:base.html.twig' %}



<div>

{% for recipe in recipes %}

<h1>{{ recipe.title }}</h1>

{% endfor %}

</div>


Drupal page.tpl.php


Twig


Twig

One last thing ...



Except, that wasn’t Twig

That was Django. Python.


Django index.html



Because the backend logic is decoupled from the front

end display, the markup structure is so similar any

themer or front end developer can pick up these

templates without first having to learn the backend

code.

Thank You!

Questions?

@Mediacurrent Mediacurrent.com

slideshare.net/mediacurrent

create a symfony application from a drupal perspective

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