Introduction Before I even start, let me state that I’m a JQuery fan. Ever since I’ve started with JavaScript frameworks I’ve weighed the pros and cons, and trust me there are a lot. You’ll always find people arguing Prototype, JQuery or MooTools. I went with JQuery because it could do all that I wanted with the least amount of bloat. I’m sorry, Prototype may do a hell of a lot, but I don’t think that I could make enough use or that 100 KB to justify it.

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).

I can’t remember where exactly I heard about this web host, but InsaneGB.com sounded like a great deal. You can read their website for more details, but in a nutshell they got PHP 5, MySQL 4, and everything (Databases, Add-on domains, etc) is unlimited except disk space and bandwidth. They give you 5GB for disk space and 20GB on bandwidth per month. Which is great for a free host, if you ask me; heck, they even offer cron jobs.

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.

After reading about Matt’s Experience with the Zend Framework, I came to the conclusion that one’s choice of a Web Development Framework doesn’t really matter. There are tons of frameworks out there and there’s a good reason for that. People still use them. If no one used a framework it would die a quick and painless death. Different frameworks offer different benefits to different people. However, I’m willing to bet that First Choice is one of the main factors affecting a developer’s choice of framework.

One thing that I liked about the jQuery website is that they offer a compressed version of the jQuery script on the website ready for immediate download and usage. This is convenient if you don’t want to go through the few steps it takes to Minify your own javascript code. Well we now have this same luxury for Prototype and its Script.aculo.us library read for download. Enjoy folks.

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.

In the last five (5) years another key phrase hit the Web Design scene and hit it hard. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is that phrase. It deals with optimizing the content and code on a website to cause the page to rank better in different search engines. Gone are the days when you slap some keywords and a description in the META tags and call it a night. Now SEO is an entire business by itself, sometimes completely separate from the design process, so it should not be taken lightly.