Symfony2: How to start a new project easily with Composer

Composer is the best thing it happened to the PHP community since PHP 5.3 was released: PHP project dependencies made easy. It's worth the little time you must spent to learn how to use it. I can't recommend it enough.

How can I use this jewel to start a Symfony2 Standard Edition project? Have a look at how easy it is:

Reset your CSS

Ever wanted a website that looks the same in all browsers? Tired of fighting slimy monsters while searching for excellance? Do these differences in UL padding make your head explode? So it's time for you to apply some CSS Reset Magic.

When it relates to CSS reset, there's a bunch of literature, do's and don't's, faqs and howtos, so this one won't take us too long.

Refactoring code smell

I work every day with PHP, developing management tools for the company where I work, but when I accepted this job I was a pure noob in this language. In fact I was hired for some C++ programming, but soon my tasks evolved so that wherever there's code, I was there too. So, learning PHP was the logical evolution in this case.

As you can imagine, being a PHP developer fresh from the oven, I ended up committing many atrocities in my code. And now is when, with some more maturity and knowledge, I can detect, by sense of smell, where those design flaws are. It's a fact, bad code smells.

HTML Tip: Think semantics

As said in Best Practices for Building Web Applications, one of the things to have in mind when developing Web Applications (or any simple HTML website) is to Think on Semantics. Let's see how this can boost our websites and raise them to the top.

Best Practices for Building Web Applications

If there's something I've learned during my developer life, is to make a list of basic rules and to be faithful to them. These rules are the skeleton on which all my own applications shall be built. Of course, these rules also evolved as time goes by, growing stronger or falling into obsolescence, often unpredictably.

Web development is not different from C++ coding, so it also has its own ruleset in order to avoid "bad habits". These are my rules, tell me yours.