So I've spent the better part of a week and a half/two weeks working on getting up to speed on Symfony, the PHP framework I finally settled down to using. If you haven't heard about it, I strongly suggest you check it out. It's a very user-friendly framework, with the ability to build on the base code and extremely easy to get into.
There is some excellent documentation to read - including an open sourced copy of the printed manual, which is updated with the latest and greatest data about each version (currently running at 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2).
I decided to start running through the Askeet tutorial - which is currently just for version 1.0, but stubborn as I am, I've been working with the latest version of 1.1, with the intent of moving to 1.2 when it becomes fully stable. If you are up to the challenge yourself, feel free to drop a line if you have any questions, or check out the community forums - you'll see me up there, mainly in the Askeet forum atm (DBA_Alex, just fyi =p ).
I have gotten up to day 11, which is where I'll be picking back up tomorrow. I'm truly looking forward to when the project team finally updates the askeet tutorial for the other symfony versions.
Anywho, tonight I'm getting back to work on updating the blog's design to match the rest of the site - something I hope to complete before the week is out. Once I finish that, I'll be pushing out a few tutorials that I've held onto which I've been polishing up - one on Pentaho report creation, and another on using the php sparkline program.