One thing that has plagued me as a designer for many years is the ability to test my designs in multiple web browsers. Back in the day, computers came with Internet Explorer 5.5 and that’s it. Installing a later version would always overwrite the previous one, so it became difficult to test my designs properly. The Easy Guys - Netscape and Opera Testing in Netscape is rather easy. You can download and install multiple versions of Netscape and they have no interaction with each other as long as you install them to different folders.

Now if you’re into Web 2.0 and haven’t heard of the Lightbox script, then you must be living under a rock. If this is your first time crawling out from under that rock, you can get a quick sample of the Lightbox effect here. Just click on the first picture and watch the magic. The Lightbox effect is used to pop up a larger image into the forefront of a web page.

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.

Poll results for What Do You Look for in a PHP Framework are in: Most of you prefer a framework that is Quick and Easy. Hey, I’m totally with you guys on that. When deciding on a web development framework, it has to be easy. It’s no fun if it takes hours to learn and saves you minutes. For me, CakePHP definitely fits this bill. The bake routines save me so much time during initial development.

By now you’ve all either heard or experienced first hand the blow dealt to the Page Rank of many websites by the mighty hand of Google. They are basically targeting any websites that serve links, which are not natural. This generally includes any links that have been sold on the website. PayPerPost is one of the largest companies out there that pay bloggers to post about different things. They are generally instructed to keep their reviews relevant to their content, but sometimes bloggers stray a bit.

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.

Patty Cake, Patty Cake, Baker’s Man One of the things that sold me on CakePHP is the bake routine. This is basically code generation for the lazy types like myself. It was good in CakePHP version 1.1, now it’s just awesome. The only way they can make it better is to implement a web version, but that’s another story. What Baking Does In CakePHP we refer to the automatic code generation as baking (get it now?

Here’s the kindergarten version of a 3 Column CSS layout that you’re going to get from most other websites: <div id="header">header stuff</div> <div id="left">left stuff</div> <div id="center">center stuff</div> <div id="right">right stuff</div> <div id="footer">footer stuff</div> Simple enough right? The alignment is done in your style sheet, where the left would float left, the center would also float left and the right would float right. You could set all your styles based on these column ids.

The Problem I’ve had this problem for a while, but it’s become more of a problem since I started working heavily with CakePHP. Here is my WAMP folder structure: D:\wamp\www\cake[various app] Under this folder, I would have baked all the different applications that I’m working on at the time (app1, app2, app3, etc). So I could have my DocumentRoot set to my cake folder and access the different apps in my browser by:

Today I popped onto the CakePHP Bakery looking for the obAuth Component. To my surprise, I got a blank page. Seems like there’s a database issue. Here’s hoping that it’s not down for too long. Update (11/20/07): Most of the stuff is back up on the bakery. The rating is still a small issue, but all the code and tutorials are up and running. Bake On!