CakePHP

In The Series Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Define The Problem In the past, I’ve done some freelance Web Development and Web Design for different clients. One question I’ve always had to ask myself is: How will the user be updating this website? That question is usually preempted by a question to the client: Do you have any HTML experience? I can count (on one hand) the number of times that I’ve heard a yes to this question.

This has always been a touchy subject, especially in larger computer firms. But first, let me tell you how I got into Open Source. I started coding in Turbo Pascal 7.0, in about 1996 when I was in Grammar School. I took Turbo Pascal more as an introduction to Programming, instead of a product to do something constructive in.

After Pascal, I was looking into something visual. Hence, I fell into Visual Basic 5.0. Yeah, I know, I’m sorry.

Legal Issues

Now this was my first step towards the open source community. I must admit, that I downloaded a pirated copy and ran with it for a while. Now, that was all well and good when I was sitting home playing around with stuff. But when it came to actually, to producing something for a market, you can’t (or should I say, shouldn’t) do that with pirated software.

After that, I got into web development. For this, there was a plethora of free tools available, for use. So I did that for a while. When I got back to college, I got into C++ (using Visual Studio, but still essentially free). That was a step in the right direction. However, as the semesters went on, we got more into using the .NET library. However, for my web development I never got into ASP.

The First Real Plunge into Open Source - Enter PHP

Bit by bit, web development gave way to web programming. This is where PHP came in. I got more familiar with PHP when I started working on different projects for clients. I chose PHP for a few main reasons:

1. Free Documentation: I could learn almost everything I needed through online documentation.
2. Cost: My first problem was hosting. ASP hosts used to be almost twice as expensive as their Linux counterparts.

The Open Source Misconception

One of the problems that people have with Open Source is that they think that it’s unsupported. People seem to think that open source software is written by a bunch of kids in basements or something. This is not the case, by any means.  For example, a lot of the Linux distributions are totally free and totally supported.  Wake up people; free doesn’t mean unsupported. The whole “You get what you pay for” isn’t always true.

I must say, this was a major hurdle for me when I first started out with CakePHP. If you’re working with some data from a database, then it’s all Model-View-Controller magic. Your forms are automatic: $form->input() is pretty much all you need. Why is this? That’s because all the information about the fields (names, sizes, types, etc.) come straight from the database. You’re Out On Your Own The problem right now is that, you’re all on your own.

This is the second installment of my Auth Component Tutorial. I included a link to download a file for during the first installment: CakePHP Auth 1 (4.3 KiB, 18,444 hits) I just think that some of the stuff in there warrants some explanation. isAuthorized() This function is needed when $this-Auth->authorize = ‘controller’. Theory has it, you can do something similar in app_model if $this-Auth->authorize = ‘model’, but I haven’t looked into this.

First off, I would like to say much thanks to Gwoo for finally helping me to understand this thing. So I know what you’re thinking; I’m probably the last person to finally figure out the CakePHP’s Auth Component. For the past few months, I’ve been using obAuth because that’s the only authentication I could get to work with CakePHP. I think that I was just making it more difficult than it should have been.

So I guess the CakePHP development staff doesn’t take any holidays. Bright and early New Years Day 2008, we’re greeted with a fresh new release of CakePHP 1.2.6331 beta. No, not pre-beta a full blown beta. Needless to say I’m excited about this. There have been some nice changes which have gone through all through the Christmas season. Guys, I thank you for your dedication. The one major thing I’m excited about is the way that the Form Helper now processes dates and times; there’s no longer a cleanUpFields() function, everything is automatic (or should I say automagic).

One problem that I’ve always had with finding CakePHP related information over the internet is the multiple sources. I wouldn’t so much mind if all these sources were legit. The thing that pisses me off is those scrapers who scrape the entire CakePHP mailing list. To me, there’s nothing worse than asking a question in the mailing list, then searching on Google for an answer, just to find some idiot has scraped your question from the mailing list.

One of the nice things about CakePHP is that it includes ready to use CSS compression. Granted, compressed CSS can be buggy at times, but for the most part it works just fine. I’ve always wondered why no one has included something like this for Javascript, since that’s usually the bigger culprit when we’re talking about document size. I’ve tried using Minify in the past. However, it took a lot to get it working right.

Before I start let me say that CakePHP is great. I love it to death. Currently, I’m coding a semester long class project for a friend. I’m trying to illustrate just how much faster it is to create a web application using CakePHP than anything else the other students are using. The Project The project consists of computerizing some department of the local university. What she’s chosen is to computerize the Audio Visual Department.

Now i doubt it has crossed anyone’s mind to use CakePHP to create a custom content management system (CMS). Even though you’re not designing a full blown CMS, sometimes it’s nice to give novice users a way to create HTML content for a website or web application. The simplest way to do this is to integrate a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. When it comes to WYSIWYG editors, they are a dime a dozen.