Symfony has learning curve, especially if you are new to the MVC setup. This post is not about MVC but about a small problem I had trying to installing a plugin.

Symfony allows you to install plugins to the framework that provide a specific purpose, the one I was trying to install was called AdminQuickCreatePlugin. If you can imagine you have a form that is all about a ‘person’, and on this form you a list of “organisations” that this person may work for, but as you start to fill the form in you realise the organisation the person works for is not in the list. So you would have to go back, create the organisation, then come back to the form and fill all the details back in for the person (you have had to update the select list to show the new organisation).
This plugin creates a small button that will open the form for an organisation, but the magic is that it will save the current forms session info and once the organisation has been created it will reopen the person form but fill in all the details you had entered but also add the new organisation.
This makes web apps a little easier to use.

Any way – the problem was all around the way symfony installs plugins, using PEAR. It refused to install normally due to a md5sum error.
To rectify the problem I had to enter the .tgz, edit the package.xml. I did use a md5sum.exe app to recreate the md5sum, but all the md5s looked ok?!
So finding the ‘<file’ I deleted the md5sum=’7630f0d1fbc…….’ part.
I then recreated the .tar.gz and used ’symfony install-plugin /plugin.tar.gz’

Hey presto.. install without a problem now.
Hopefully this may help anyone who has a similar problem.
Just a word of warning though, the md5sum is used to make sure the file hasn’t been compromised, so always do a virus check.

ta

adam