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.
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.
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?
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!
First of let me state that this post is very bias towards CakePHP. Truth be told, I haven’t even installed or used Ruby on Rails. The closest I’ve come is looking at various code snippets I’ve found around. With that said, you may want to stop reading now.
These arguments are not based on hard facts, since I haven’t done much research on the matter. A lot of them come from a post at Clickable Bliss discussing the PHP vs. Ruby On Rails Issue.
-
Steep Learning Curve - Laziness
One thing I really hate is learning stuff. It is especially bothersome when you're trying to crank out a project or web application in a limited amount of time.
With CakePHP I'm required to learn about the **MVC style of development** as well as CakePHP **conventions**.
With Ruby on Rails, I would have to learn MVC, Ruby on Rails conventions and I would have to s**tart from scratch with the Ruby programming language** as well.
With this post I’m introducing a new segment to this blog: Cute CakePHP Trick of the Day.
This is basically going to be a learn as I learn sort of thing. There are always a bunch of little things that I want to do in CakePHP, but just haven’t figured out. So every time I stumble onto something, I’ll let you guys in on it.
I love the GenerateList() function. This is generally used when you have models with associations with other models.