I've done my fair share of working for closed and "open" companies. I've recently (in July 2011) clocked over two years working here at the Cake Development Corporation, and while attending the Open Source Developers Conference (2011) in Canberra, I have had some time to reflect on my experiences with the company, and my feelings regarding my work here.

Traditionally I have found that companies that claim to be pro-FOSS or open source companies are those that are making a profit, through the use of open source technologies. This is awesome. I love that the proliferation of open source software continues to grow and be adopted by traditionally closed, and proprietary software users. This produces better quality software for all of us.

While CakeDC produces a large quantity of client projects that are closed source, what we do have control over is the common reusable components that...

Everyone knows CakePHP has one of the largest and most loyal communities in the Open Source world, over the last few months we have been witnessing some very disturbing things happening to one of our community members. Many of you may know Jonathan Freeman over at Widget Press he created some tools that have helped many people build applications using CakePHP. He has also been a target of a patent troll suing him for patent infringement.

As a software developer I find the tactics of the software patent trolls to be one of the biggest hurdles of innovation in todays development market, too many people afraid to pursue an idea because they fear being sued by a company who had an idea and was not skillful enough to build something from that idea. What upsets me even more is these trolls target people or companies who do not have the funds to stand up to "Goliath" and defend themselves...

Following the release an update for our Utils Plugin, we've compiled a few commits that have been finalised on the Tags plugin, bundled it and packaged for release.

The tags plugin, if you've not used it, is a great and simple plugin that allows you to apply tags to any object in your existing application without modification of tables or structure. Its unobtrusive, and awesome.

This latest update takes it to v1.1 with the following changes:

• Commit [79afb1d]: Update inline docs, and test behavior removal for #5
• Commit [0d96881]: Renamed schema to work properly.
• Commit [982ff5b]: Minor readme update.
• Commit [edd0e8e]: updating readme
• Commit [db78a26]: update russian translation plural forms
• Commit [48c1a44]: Adding spanish translation
• Commit [3347464]: Added Portuguese translation
• Commit [f4c4e6b]: Adding german translation file
• Commit [44379a7]: Update license text.
• Comm...

This is an introduction to using the CakeDC Tags plugin for CakePHP. I'll take you through a new project creation, and the addition of the Tags plugin to your project for use with tagging a Blog model on your project. You should be able to take the skills learnt here to any other project, and start taking advantage of the Tags plugin for tagging your models appropriately.

Lets get started by baking a new project:

Follow the prompts to complete the baking operation.

You will now have a "blog1" directory available. Change into that directory:

ensure that the `tmp` directory is writable:

Open up the `config/database.php.default` file in your favourite editor. Immediately choose to "Save as..." and save the file in the same location omitting the ".default" part of the filename. So save the file as `config/database.php`....

The Utils plugin is our mixed bag of "awesome". If you've not yet checked it out, definitely hop over to github to check it out. It aggregates a lot of useful code and miscellaneous ideas into a single plugin thats portable and dead easy to use in your applications.

Since its release in September, we've made a few changes and updates, and we've bundled a new version for release.

Here's a summary of the commits:

• Commit [7bdf401]: Update license and readme.
• Commit [e7630bd]: Added tests for data retrieval and false return from model delete.
• Commit [8510fe4]: Updated documentation for Soft Delete tests.
• Commit [f7d9983]: Removed empty test file.
• Commit [c5db61b]: Changed the behavior saving the position manipulation without running model callbacks and validation by default. This is now also configureable by setting 'callbacks' and 'validate' in the behavior settings to true/fals...