sympLIST

Symfony Best Practices

Submitted By bshaffer

Best practices in software development are all about improving communication between developers through standardization and enhancing security, maintainability, portability and interoperability by increasing code quality.

1. 17
   Supplementary documents should be written in English
   Submitted By bshaffer

   This includes all code comments, phpdoc, INSTALL, CHANGELOG, and README files, variables, functions, class and method names and all developer documentation.

2. 11
   No Propel Criteria or Doctrine_Query instances, SQL queries and any ORM-specific calls should ever be found in the templates or actions
   Submitted By bshaffer

   The more you couple your model to your controllers and views, the harder it will be to change your persistence backend or strategy.

3. 7
   Use routes instead of raw module/action couple in url_for(), link_to() and redirect() calls
   Submitted By bshaffer

   Good: <?php echo url_for('@route_name') ?>

   Bad: <?php echo url_for('module/action') ?>

   • Also, default routes should be deactivated by default (at least in apps which don't run admin-generator 1.0 modules)
4. 6
   Always enable output escaping and CSRF protection
   Submitted By bshaffer

   Starting with symfony 1.3, they're enabled by default. Always call a redirect after posting data

   1. for security purpose
   2. for ergonomy
   3. to avoid duplicates in the database
   4. don't forget to add a flash message to the end user after every transaction made.
5. 4
   Controller methods should be less than 30 lines, controller class should have less than 15 action methods
   Submitted By bshaffer

   If this is an issue, your code needs to be refactored into the model layer or broken out into multiple modules.

6. 3
   Always apply consistent coding standards
   Submitted By bshaffer

   Use symfony's coding standards, which you can find here

7. 3
   Catch and log exception messages, display human-readable error messages to the end user
8. 3
   Symfony core files should never be modified to add or change the features they provide.
   Submitted By bshaffer

   Instead, replace them through the autoloading mechanism, or way better: extended.

   Tweaking the factories.yml file and catching native symfony events can help a lot in achieving this goal.

9. 2
   Verify cache settings, especially that the cache is enabled in prod
   Submitted By bshaffer

   • Don't laugh, it happens quite often
   • If you use cache, create a staging environment to test the caching strategy if it doesn't exist.
   • Better: avoid using cache. No kidding.
10. 2
    Manage the view within the view
    Submitted By bshaffer

    • Try to avoid the use of the view.yml file
    • Try to avoid handling the view from the controller (eeeek) or the model (you're fired)
    • Slots can help (a lot)
11. 1
    Only deploy production front controllers in production
    Submitted By bshaffer

    Make sure your development toolbar is not visible to users or search engines!

12. 1
    The templates must contain PHP alternative templating syntax, for readability and ease of use
13. 0
    Always write "symfony" starting with a small cap