Planet CakePHP - English

CakeFest 2010: Thats a wrap

The Bakery — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 12:00:00 +0000

CakeFest 2010 has come to a close. After 4 days of jam-packed talks, workshops, lightning talks and social outings, we're sad to see it finish.

DebugKit plugin for Croogo

Fahad Ibnay Heylaal — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 02:11:00 +0000

If you are a CakePHP developer, you must know about DebugKit plugin by Mark Story already. It provides a debugging toolbar and enhanced debugging tools for CakePHP applications. As far as I remember, it is the first plugin I tried in my applications and this may be the case for most developers too.

So why am I posting it here again? Just to demonstrate how it can be used with Croogo's plugin/hook system. A few weeks ago, I forked DebugKit and made it Croogo ready so anyone can upload it from the admin panel and start using it without having to worry about editing php files (app_controller.php here) manually.

All I did was add two files under a new directory 'config' to this awesome plugin, and done! First was an YAML file and the other was a PHP file. The file structure looks like this:

/app/plugins/debug_kit/
- config (the new directory)
  - debug_kit_bootstrap.php
  - plugin.yml
- controllers/
- models/
- views/
- ...
- debug_kit_app_controller.php
- debug_kit_app_model.php

The YAML file

plugin.yml file is used for storing basic information about the plugin like it's description, author's name, website, etc. It can also contain information like it's dependencies. But we don't need anything like that for this plugin now:

name: DebugKit
description: DebugKit plugin

author: Mark Story
authorEmail:
authorUrl: http://mark-story.com

The plugin's bootstrap file

debug_kit_bootstrap.php is loaded every time the application bootstraps (only when the plugin is active). It handles configuration so DebugKit's Toolbar component is loaded in every controller.

<?php Croogo::hookComponent('*', 'DebugKit.Toolbar'); ?>

If you wanted the component to load only in, say, Users controller:

<?php Croogo::hookComponent('Users', 'DebugKit.Toolbar'); ?>

That wasn't too difficult, right? Now you can log in to Croogo's admin panel and activate the plugin from Extensions > Plugins page and you will see the toolbar at top right of your browser immediately. You can also deactivate it once you are done with debugging.

To learn more about how plugins work in Croogo, read the wiki.

Download

Get the modified version of DebugKit from http://github.com/fahad19/debug_kit.

Relocation and New Job

Andrew Weir — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 21:01:00 +0000

I recently moved back home to Toronto, Canada after living in Asia for almost 6 years. I decided it was time to move back and get a "real" job since freelance and contract work was starting to die down.

Upon my arrival I started work with a company downtown Toronto, BetterTheWorld.com. I was hired as a Sr. PHP Developer to work with their current platform and help design and build out new properties. We are currently using Croogo to rebuild one of our current properties and will be open sourcing some of the plugins we develop.

Hopefully I will have some free time to write some more articles on Croogo, CakePHP, web development and release some more code. Stay tuned and subscribe to my RSS feed.

CSS trick

Nik Chankov — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 19:03:51 +0000

Probably everybody know how to match dom elements with css. For example if you want to match all

elements. you are doing something like this: li{color: red} This way every list element will have red text color. The more advanced example is if you want to select only the active element – [...]

Simple Theme Released for Croogo 1.3.2

Andrew Weir — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 17:09:00 +0000

After a long hiatus I am back with an update to my Croogo theme 'Simple'. To install simply unzip the theme's folder into the themed directory or use the built in theme uploader in Croogo's administration panel. Look forward to some new posts on Croogo, CakePHP and some other stuff I have going on.

If you have any questions or problems drop me a line in the comments section.

Croogo 1.3.2 released!

Fahad Ibnay Heylaal — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 14:39:00 +0000

Let's call this version Plugins-Are-Awesome version! I have spent more time thinking than actually coding about how plugins can integrate themselves with the whole application more easily without having to touch the core. And I believe, I have been able to take the right direction. Still a long way to go. This release consists of 55 commits resolving 18 tickets, and fixing a number of bugs.

Download

Download the latest version from GitHub: http://github.com/croogo/croogo/downloads.

Changelog

See all commits for this release on GitHub, and tickets on LightHouse.

New and improved plugin/hook system

The major change in this release is how plugins work in Croogo. Previously, administrators were given the ability to activate/deactivate a helper or a component (hook) individually, which is bad because it expects the administrator to know about CakePHP development. But now you activate/deactive a plugin as a whole only, which is easier to understand for non-developers. And it is from the plugin's own bootstrap file that you decide which items to hook (let it be a component, helper, behavior or routes). The administrator doesn't need to know what happens there.

Upgrading existing Croogo installations

There has been no change in the database schema since the last release. A simple 'git pull' should update everything smoothly (like my blog). If you have developed plugins utilizing the hook system of Croogo, you should read the Developers section of the new wiki.

Site is up with documentation!

Yes, I know I have been very slow (may be lazy) with documentation. One of the reasons is that things were continuously being improved for more flexibility and ease of use. But the API is getting pretty stable now, and there is no reason for not writing documentation. Check out the site here at http://croogo.org. I will be writing for the next few weeks constantly, and once the wiki is in a decent shape, I will turn it into a git/markdown based wiki so user contribution and translation becomes easier.

What's next?

Next release will be all about user experience (aka UX). There will be a more usable and accessible (and of course, good looking!) admin panel. I lack skill in designing area, so if any of you want to share your experience and send suggestions, please post on Google Group. Submitting screenshots highlighting the good parts of other existing solutions would help too. Mockups would be highly appreciated!

If the project progresses at the current speed, I am positive that a stable version will be available in the next three releases. But don't expect a label of 'stable' unless there is decent test case coverage.

Extensions

An extensions directory could be up soon. And it largely depends on the number of community contributed plugins and themes. I can see a number of plugins being developed already, but there aren't many theme designers interested in Croogo yet. So if your friend is a designer, make sure you recommend Croogo to him/her!

Enjoy and Happy Baking!

Sharpening the Blades: Useful Tweets

The Code Dojo — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 19:30:58 +0000

Below are some tweets that I have seen recently that I have found to be helpful.
Smashing Magazine – HTML5/CSS3 Cheatsheet – http://bit.ly/aj0yfA
Ben Ludman – URL shorteners and CakePHP – Snook.ca http://bit.ly/btTmSP
And this site – HTML5 Doctor – I couldn’t track down the tweet that I found it from, but it is a great resource for HTML5.
I looked for some tweets about Magento, but just couldn’t find any that were appealing.

Single query cache and pagination cache (until a future post) and ad hoc joins. An over-override of appModel::find

Stefano Manfredini — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:11:52 +0000

In a project i’m working on, being unaware of super behaviours or plugins that may appear on github, i made some search to find fast and effective solutions (or ideas) for the needs at hand. Namely, performance -> caching. Needs stacked over time. I liked the idea of single query cache. I needed ad hoc [...]

CakePHP 1.3.3 Admin Section Template Files

James Fairhurst — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 05:50:18 +0000

I've been getting to grips with the newest release of CakePHP which at the time of writing is 1.3.3. The first thing I usually do on an application is get a simple Admin section underway and here it is.

Everything has been included in a single zip file but you must first go through the motions of creating the database and update the database.php file as well as change a few things in the core.php file.

CakePHP: CakeMenu plugin

Nik Chankov — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:40:14 +0000

I am using it for a while, but today I’ve decided to publish in the github.com. What this plugin does? The plugin is complete solution to add menu in your applications. It uses the nifty Superfish – jQuery menu plugin. You can find more info for it at http://users.tpg.com.au/j_birch/plugins/superfish/ Cakemenu can work with multilevel menus [...]

Understanding hidden classes in v8

Debuggable Ltd — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:40:04 +0000

With JSConf.eu coming closer, I slowly have to start preparing my talk, which
mostly means hacking on node-dirty.

I have a few goals for the project. My main interest is challenging a few
assumptions people have about the performance and complexity of database
systems. Most of that is material for another post and my talk itself, but
today I'd like to talk about hidden classes in v8.

One of the things that is really fast in v8 is property lookups. This is
due to an optimization that creates hidden classes for an object.

I could go into a lengthy explanation of how that works, but instead I'll
invite you to see for yourself.

Consider the following two examples and guess which runs faster, and by how much:

Example 1:

var PROPERTIES = 10000000;
var o = {};

var start = +new Date;

for (var i = 0; i < PROPERTIES; i++) {
o[i] = i;
}

console.log(+new Date - start);

Example 2:

var PROPERTIES = 10000000;

function O(size) {
for (var i = 0; i < size; i++) {
this[i] = null;
}
}

var o = new O(PROPERTIES);

var start = +new Date;

for (var i = 0; i < PROPERTIES; i++) {
o[i] = i;
}

console.log(+new Date - start);

If you have guessed example 2, congratulations! Bonus points if you have also
guessed that example 2 is a nifty 10x faster than example 1.

For those familiar with v8, you probably already know what is going. For those
who don't, let me explain.

In example 1, every time you are setting a property on the o object, v8 is
creating a new hidden class that defines the "data structure" of the o object
to optimize property lookup performance.

In example 2, we are initializing these "hidden classes" the first time we create
our o object. So when we are overwriting these properties later on, it is blazing fast, because v8 already knows how to efficiently lookup those properties.

So if you're writing node.js code, the lesson learned here is that it is much faster to work with existing properties in v8, than to add new ones.

In my next version of dirty I am planning to take advantage of this behavior by pre-allocating properties before they are actually used. This will probably require a little trickery to map user-defined keys to pre-allocated properties, but it should result in an overall 10x performance boost for setting new keys.

Let me know what you think / if you have other clever v8 hacks to speed stuff up : ).

--fg

PS: You can read more about hidden classes in the v8 docs.

Preserving whitespace in bash variables

Geoff Garbers — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 08:24:43 +0000

I’ve been creating some bash scripts for an importer we are running at work. I was looking to do two things with this. Firstly, I wanted to brush up on my knowledge of bash scripting. Secondly, I wanted to improve the notifications sent out from the importer. I managed to get everything working fine. Except [...]

Using the Database for Sessions in CakePHP

James Fairhurst — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 05:41:25 +0000

Just a quick tip, I've been playing with the new 1.3.3 version of Cake recently and was trying to get the database sessions up and running but had difficultly finding the schema for the sessions table without using the command line to generate the table.

Here's the raw SQL that can be used to create the table. I'm sure it'll be useful in the future for me so I thought I'd share.

CREATE TABLE `cake_sessions` (
`id` varchar(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
`data` text,
`expires` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
);

Now you just need to modify the core.php file so that the database is used for Sessions instead of the default:

Configure::write('Session.save', 'database');

ORM Designer

Leonid Mamchenkov — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:23:10 +0000

Here is a tool that might help you with your MVC framework, like CakePHP, Symfony, and others – ORM Designer. In essence, it is a graphical user interface for drawing a visual representation of your project (such as an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD)) and than converting it into the code. You can specify which framework and which ORM you want to use and it will generate the appropriate bits and pieces. What’s even more interesting is that it has import functionality, which means that you can start using it with an existing project. Here is the video that shows and explains more.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNlmU6zX5Ug

Of course, I got excited about it, downloaded and installed. Two things that disappointed me were:

It’s a native Windows application, which runs on Linux through the wine emulator. While it works fine, I’d much prefer a native application that I could integrate with the rest of my development environment.
CakePHP import is not supported at this time.

Other than that though, it looks very promising. I’ve seen quite a few applications that help with database design, and ORM Designer stands well in that row. You can create entities, define fields, specify indexes, and associate entities with each other using relationships. Many-to-many relationships are supported, as are entity inheritance. While inheritance does make it for a bit more complicated structure of the project (with app/models/base/ folder for CakePHP), it’s very nice to have such support for bigger, more complex projects.

The project is commercial, with a 14 days evaluation version available for download. If you like it enough to buy, the price is very reasonable – 99 EUR per license.

Try and see if you like it, and provide some feedback to the guys who are developing it. ORM Designer has all the chances of becoming an extremely useful tool and since it is still in its early development, your feedback would be of the most value.

Tags: CakePHP, databases, PHP, tools

Integrate CakePHP and jQuery UI

Eureka! » CakePHP — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:01:04 +0000

jQuery UI provides many fancy user interfaces for web developers. You can follow the steps below in order to use jQuery UI in CakePHP.
1. Download the jQuery UI library at jqueryui.com

2. Unzip the downloaded archive and copy the css folder and two .js files to /app/webroot

css/
js/jquery-1.4.2.min.js
js/jquery-ui-1.8.4.custom.min.js

3. Add the following lines in your view file where you want to use the jQuery UI components

<?php echo $html->script('jquery-1.4.2.min.js'); ?>
<?php echo $html->script('jquery-ui-1.8.4.custom.min.js'); ?>
<?php echo $html->css('/jquery-ui-1.8.4.custom.css'); ?>

4. Let’s add a date picker in a text box as a trial

jQuery(document).ready(function($){
$('#date').datepicker();
});

5. Here is what i got

Done =)
Filed under: CakePHP, jQuery Tagged: CakePHP, jQuery, jQuery UI

Alertpay automated sales via IPN

The Bakery — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 06:42:00 +0000

I'm going to show you how I implemented a payment module via the Alertpay payment processor.

Loadsys to Give Away Tech Books Twice a Month

Loadsys — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 19:21:21 +0000

We have decided to start pushing education and different technologies by giving away educational material on every 1st and 15th of the month. There is no catch, but be sure to read the directions below on how to enter.
Book topics that will be included in the giveaway are:

CakePHP
Ajax (in particular JQuery)
MySQL
No-SQL Databases (ie. Mongo, Cassandra, Couch DB)
PHP
Zend Framework
Project Management
(Possibly More)

To be included in the drawing for each part of the month, you simply need to post a tweet that mentions Loadsys (@loadsys) and tag it with CakePHP (#cakephp). It would also be helpful to follow us so you can get notified when we draw the name. We will only ask for more information privately when we need to ship out the book.
Although it won’t help you, clever or off-the-wall tweets are perfectly fine. Just make the mention and the tag. Be sure to let all of your friends on Twitter know if they are interested in winning.
(Example Tweet: @loadsys Please Please Please give me a #CakePHP book. )
Drawings will be done at Noon Central Standard Time (-5 GMT / -6 GMT). That means tweets performed between 12:01 on the 1st through 11:59:59 on the 15th will be in the 15th drawing…for example.
Good Luck!
Share This

CakePHP: Authake plugin with installation guide

Nik Chankov — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 08:53:55 +0000

Finally the Authake Plugin have an Installation guide. Basically the plugin provide Authentication and Authorization functionality for CakePHP’s appliation with few line of code. Authake has advanced User-Group-Role interface and allow you to secure your CakePHP’s application within a minute. The current version of the Plugin is “wrapped” in a single folder (according to CakePHP [...]

The CakeRequest object in CakePHP 2.0

Mark Story — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 03:12:13 +0000

Work on CakePHP 2.0 is moving along, and I wanted to take some time to discuss and explain one of the sizeable refactorings that has been done for 2.0. In previous versions request parameters were just a bunch of arrays that were copied to the various places they were needed in the framework.

[CakePHP] How to re-size images at run-time

SANIsoft — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 02:30:35 +0000

This is a helper + controller combo for CakePHP which I often use. It helps to re-size images at run-time and also aid display them. Oh yes! once the image is resized it also caches them. First let's look at helper method. PLAIN TEXT PHP: class MyHelper extends AppHelper { function getImageUrl($path, $size, [...]

Complete bbcode helper with custom tags

The Bakery — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 11:17:06 +0000

Hi to everybody, this is a simple way of implement a bbcode parser, i have upload this because i haven`t found anything that let me implement my own tags and the helpers i have seen werent very secure.

Pagination for custom queries

The Bakery — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 10:25:06 +0000

I was doing a project, and needed to do a custom query to return a certain set of data from the table. I needed to be able to paginate those results, and using the "out of the box" or "base" pagination was not going to be able to handle this. So I needed to use the power of the paginator object, and set a custom query, using a custom model object, and set the options for the views to build the links appropriately.

How to use a Custom Session setup with Database Storage

The Bakery — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 03:07:42 +0000

There's plenty of information out there on how to create your own session handler for CakePHP, but when I needed to add some customization on top of the database storage system, I had to do a good amount of debugging and tracing to find out the best way to accomplish it. Hopefully, this will save you some time if you're doing the same thing.

First Data Global Gateway API Plugin Component

The Bakery — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 02:55:27 +0000

The Ggapi component simplifies credit card processing using the First Data/Yourpay/Linkpoint Global Gateway API. It supports testing and live configurations, along with local to remote field mapping.

Once configured, all you have to do is feed the component an array of order data (fields used are up to you) and it will map the fields, build the XML string, submit the string, read the response from the gateway, and convert the response back into an array.

Use different configs for different environments

The Bakery — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 02:52:10 +0000

Coming from Rails, I was surprised that I couldn't find any support for multiple configuration environments in CakePHP. There were a couple of other solutions for Cake, but I found them a bit complex for what they try to achieve. Having said that, my method only supports config variables, and not database configs as yet.

Twitter model plus plus (for the Twitter DataSource)

The Bakery — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 02:40:52 +0000

I've added a few helpful functions to the Twitter model for the Twitter DataSource example in the 1.3 CakePHP Cookbook. Specifically, the auto detection and shrinking of URLs in a string intended for Twitter.

New Feed: Louie Miranda

Derick Ng — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 06:10:23 +0000

Software Developer, Seasonal Designer, System Administrator, Entrepreneur and Amateur Photographer.

Google Voice and Gmail play nice to deliver telephone to pc calls

Edward A. Webb — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 21:50:00 +0000

You may have seen the news recently that Gmail can not place calls to your contacts through the use of a browser plugin, and google voice’s VOIP infrastructure. All you need is a headset or microphone for your PC to send calls. But the best part is the flip side — calls to my Google [...]

Please visit EdwardAWebb.com to view the rest of this article without ads.

The lifecycle of a PHP script

Geoff Garbers — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:32:54 +0000

I was researching some libraries in PHP for the interaction of PHP and XMPP, and stumbled across an interesting article on the life cycle of a PHP script – from initialization to shutdown. It’s an old post (from 2008), but I would imagine the same principles still apply. It’s worth a read if you’re a [...]

Image Version Component

The Bakery — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 12:26:20 +0000

Generate thumbnails from images within your app dynamically with many options to control how the images are resized.