Cake Development Corporation

For my first entry, I am going to talk about how to create an RSS Feed on your website. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format used to publish frequently updated works such as blogs or featured products. RSS defines a set of XML elements that are used to describe a channel or feed of information. An RSS feed is comprised of two parts, first is the metadata describing the channel and second is the records that make up the elements of the feed. RSS feeds allow your sites visitors to access the information on your site using software that reads these feeds. This will allow your site's visitors to stay up-to-date on the information on your site.

CakePHP allows for easy integration of RSS feeds into existing controller actions through the automatic router extension parsing. This allows us to specify what type of response we want from a URL through adding the proper extension to the U...

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Tags: | CakePHP | RSS | RSS Helper | Helpers |

I will tell you a story. Once upon a time... Seriously though, it was not too long ago in the past - but it happened and it is possible you can benefit from it.

What?

This tutorial will show how to make lighttpd 1.4.20 serve virtual hosts with CakePHP applications. Our scenario is quite simple:

For admin purposes, lighttpd will listen on localhost, it will serve several CakePHP applications on several external ip addresses, without SSL. Virtual hosts will be organized in groups and every group will use one CakePHP core checkout for its virtual hosts. Every virtual host will have it own access log (this server will not run hundreds of virtual hosts, so we can afford to waste one file descriptor for each) and its own directory for caching of compressed static files. Management of virtual hosts, their default and custom settings should be as easy as possible, so we can delegate ...Read More...

Tags: | Lighttpd | CakePHP | lighttpd |

This article assumes you practice semantic markup and have a fairly good understanding of CSS.

CakePHP does a number of things automatically that designers might not expect, which can cause confusion for designers and difficulty for developers in implementing markup. I hope to provide some general purpose information and guidelines to designing for a CakePHP site. I would like to make a couple quick notes first however. CakePHP is a very flexible platform where markup can be re-used very easily. The more you as a designer try to make reusable markup, the easier your developers life will be. One of the most important things that you can do is to avoid id's other than for top level wrappers such as columns. This allows the developer to change content to address shifting specifications without having to rewrite chunks of CSS in order to avoid Id conflicts in the generated markup.

CakeP...

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The articles section of our site will include best practices, business advice, and technical advice, updated weekly or more often by our talented developers. Our articles will touch upon a wide range of topics from our experiences and expertise. Check back frequently for fresh thoughts from our seasoned talent, including Mark Story who was at CakeFest in Argentina providing updates daily on the talks.

As a founder of and lead developer at the Cake Development Corporation, I am proud to provide the inaugural article for the all new CakeDC.com. It has been a long and wonderful last 12 months, and CakeDC has helped bring reality to the limitless potential of our clients' projects. Like any great recipe, the ingredients of Cake Development Corporation have been hand–selected and carefully measured to create the very best blend of talent, imagination, and sophistication of any team in the...

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Tags: | CakePHP | Development | CakeDC |

Felix started off by baking his application. While baking his controller he added in the Javascript Helper and RequestHandler Component. This will save adding them in later. Because the demo was based on Jquery the Ajax helper could not be used. However, Felix raised a very good issue of using a helper vs. writing Javascript. His opinion is that if you want to build a heavy AJAX application you should write all your javascript. If you just need a bit of AJAX sprinkled on you can use the helper. However, helpers are difficult to use in wide applications as they abstract one language into another which is tricky.

Felix talked briefly about how he organizes his javascript. He likes to have specific javascript files for each controller/view placed in js/views as well as a few utility libraries. This allows his projects to reuse general js code as well as keep the Javascript separat...

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Tags: | CakePHP | CakeFest | Jquery |

Since we got through bake on the last talk, we are going to look at some advanced usage of bake and other consoles. The interactive console was demonstrated. With the interactive console, you can examine the routes, interact with models. Following the console demonstration, Garrett demonstrated creation of a custom shell. Building on a previous example application, garret started building a shell to generate a menu. This covered creating methods in your shell, using in() and out() as well as how to access args and params.

A demo of Cakebot was next. Cakebot is the IRC bot used in #cakephp, Cakebot was also written as a CakePHP shell.

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Tags: | CakePHP | CakeFest | console |

Why internationalize? You can attract a larger market by making content available in additional languages. When offering international content, you need to translate both the fixed and dynamic content in the database. In CakePHP you can facilitate translation with __() and __n(). In addition content stored in the database can be translated with TranslateBehavior. Multibyte characters exist in many languages, characters outside the traditional latin character set are represented with multibyte characters. This allows for the creation of additional characters and idiomatic expresssion. There is a PHP extentsion for using multibyte strings, it provides the mb_ functions. CakePHP also provides a MultiByte class which provides all the mb_ functions for PHP4 or PHP5 installations lacking them.

Using translation in CakePHP

By using __() we can create translatable strings in our appl...

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Tags: | CakePHP | CakeFest | i18n |

Martin's presentation was based around a behavior that he wrote to provide access control using SQL. In designing a solution, martin came up with a few criteria. The solution must be generic, it only requires 4 fields on any table that will be using the behavior. It should perform quickly and not create a lot of extra queries. The solution he searched for also needed to provide a few features. It should provide permissions for read write and delete. Permissions are assigned by role, with users having many roles. This system is similar to ACL but different, in that it stores the permissions for each record.

Martin's behavior uses a permission system similar to the unix file system, with a owner, group, world access. This was implemented as series of bit masks. Unlike the unix filesystems, these permissions are summed and stored as one field. The 4 fields mentioned earlier are us...

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Tags: | CakePHP | CakeFest | Access Control |

Why talk about large companies. Larger companies have large demands and often they involve money over the internet. Large companies require fast and efficient applications, which in turn requires efficient tools. This is where CakePHP steps in. Current solutions for large merchant solutions include Java, and .Net solutions. In addition to these solutions, there are alternatives in PHP, ruby, python. However, rapid development is difficult in some of the popular solutions. By using an alternate solution you can tap into a large pool of developers worldwide. CakePHP helps in this area as well, as with a large community allows you to find developers to fill specific roles. CakePHP offers connectors for many databases. CakePHP also offers easy to use and efficient caching methods which help improve performance.

There are many CakePHP sites run by large companies including Mozilla,...

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Tags: | CakePHP | CakeFest |