Symfony has grown in to a huge beast. It has taken me the best part of 5minutes to check out the latest beta from the subversion server.

This includes things like the Propel 1.4 plugin for database ORM and Doctrine plugin, for database ORM.

For my latest project I’m going to go with Doctrine; I don’t need propel in this instance. I’m sure I’m not going to need a lot of the plugins that come in the core distribution either.

What symfony needs is a downloads builder, similar to that you get on the JQuery UI. You select the components you require, it bundles up the components and their dependencies into a custom ZIP file which only has what you required.

I know it’s the case that at the start of a project, you don’t know what you’ll use prior to the first production release, but you’ll sure know which ORM you’re going to use (Propel or Doctrine, possibly none if it’s a consumer of webservices).

You’re likely to require some form of Authentication & Authorisation. So bung in sfGuard in the appropriate flavour. Propel, Doctrine, LDAP, PAM, etc.

When an application goes into production you would want the whole deployment to be as lean as possible, so based on what you’ve developed, you could build another custom download with everything that you require but none of the other bloat that isn’t required on your production environment.

A somewhat blue sky option could be, based on the coverage of your lime unit/functional tests: a list of what plugins/libraries your system uses and feed that into a custom build/deployment task.

LastPass Password Manager, Form Filler – The Last Password You’ll Have To Remember.

This is my new favorite thing after wordpress, both of which I set up on the same day.  It replaces your Firefox and Internet Explorer password vaults with it’s own.

For new accounts that you set up you can have it generate random passwords that are stored within the vault.  Lastpass’ plugin will automatically fill in the correct password and optionally ask you to confirm the master password for your Lastpass account first.  You get great, strong passwords unique to each of the sites that you’re visiting but only have to remember one of them.

You can also update currently held accounts and generate new passwords for them, which I’ve slowly but surely been doing over the past few days since I installed it.

In addition to this, it has a number of really great things that come free!  You can set up profiles so that it fills out forms for you automatically.  You can have multiple profiles for work, home, etc.  You can even store bank account/credit card details if you so wished.  I’ve not took that particular plunge yet.

I really cannot believe that it is free.