sfMyPlugins, 2 years later

Well, 2 years have passed since my post: "Writing symfony plugins is great... maintaining them is better !". I followed my own advices and all my plugins where updated for symfony 1.4 which will be the last major version of the 1.x branch. Now let's see how things evolved since 2 years:

sfDB4toPropelPlugin

• User counts: 11 (+8 users since 12 apr 2009)
• Available for: sf 1.4, 1.3, 1.2
• Users feedbacks: 0
• I like and use the sfDB4toPropelPlugin !
• Want the Symfony2 bundle ? Send me an email !

I must admit I don't use this plugin any more. Because most of people are using Doctrine as it is the recommended ORM for symfony now. But it can be useful for a small project. I didn't had feedbacks about it, it just "do the job" as it should. (It's very stable because it was extensively used for 2 big 1.0 projects)

sfLightboxPlugin

• User counts: 55 (+39 users since 12 apr 2009)
• Available for: sf 1.4, 1.3, 1.2, 1.1, 1.0
• Users feedbacks: 1
• I like and use the sfLightboxPlugin !

It's probably the most useless of my plugin, but I think it is used because it is well documented, very easy to use and available for all symfony major versions.

sfTCPDFPlugin

• User counts: 93 (+84 users since 12 apr 2009)
• Available for: 1.4, 1.3, 1.2
• Users feedbacks: 4
• I like and use the sfTCPDFPlugin !

This plugin had a very nice users boost since its creation, its my most popular plugin. Therefore I suppose that it works quiet well. It allows to avoid dealing with the unfriendly TCPDF constants with a help of a multi-configurations YAML file.

sfTaskLoggerPlugin

• User counts: 8
• Available for: 1.4, 1.3, 1.2, 1.1
• Users feedbacks: 3
• I like and use the sfTaskLoggerPlugin !

Even I think this is the most useful plugin I have done, it is also the most unpopular. It may be due to the large amount of plugins already dealing with tasks, crons, jobs-queues and so on... sfDoctrineCronManagerPlugin, axCronPlugin, sfMCronPlugin, sfJobQueuePlugin, sfGearmanPlugin. I must admit I didn't tried the others as mine fits my needs and the ones of the companies I worked for until now.

sfProjectAnalyserPlugin

• User counts: 27 (+27 users since 7 jan 2011)
• Available for: 1.4, 1.3, 1.2
• Users feedbacks: 7
• I like and use the sfProjectAnalyserPlugin !

This is my last plugin (well "our" plugin as I was not the only to contribute, thanks to all the contributors !) This is probably the most interesting as people where quiet curious about it and we had quiet a lot of positive feedbacks. What is it for ?

The sfProjectAnalyserPlugin allows you to analyse your symfony project, it can raise several coding standards alerts. A YAML configuration file allows you to switch what to analyse and also allows you to parameter threshold for each alert. This plugin can be helpful in mainly two situations:

• You quickly want to check the volumetry and code quality of a symfony project your are going to maintain.
• While developing a project from scratch, as a continuous integration tool, to ensure that as the project grows, you keep on following the symfony coding standards you defined at the very beginning of your project.

Others plugins

• RIP: sfJoomla15BridgePlugin, I gave the leadership of this plugin to another developer (but there is no more activity).
• RIP: sfWorkbenchPlugin: The XML structure of the generated WB schema was quiet hard to parse and I didn't find time to finish its proof of concept. Nevertheless, I would be glad if someone could take over this plugin. It could be very useful and used by many "lazy" developers (Well like me !)

That's 208 "regular" users for all these plugins, which is quiet a good score. I think my "symfony1 plugin developer career" is now over. I hope they have been useful for some of you. Obviously I will continue to maintain theme if big bugs were discovered. But don't except major new features. And now let's publish my first Symfony2"bundle".