News

Preface

I just wanted to say this is probably the highest quality of links I’ve ever put together for one of these digests. There have been some really good blog posts and code released over the last 2+ weeks.

Updated IBM Tutorial

I saw this link floating around, but ignored it for awhile since I thought it was just the old version of IBM’s Cooking Up Websites Fast brought back to life. Turns out it’s completely updated for 1.2 and covers everything from installation to security to caching.

@CakePHP

So what happened to the CakePHP twitter account? Did the devs lose the password? Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that I’m the last link tweeted, but it’s been over a month now. Let’s get this thing rolling again.

Tickets and Commits

Validation Rules

I’m sure the Cake team would be perfectly happy to go the rest of their lives without ever seeing this ticket again, but I’ll bring it up one last time. It’s #5145 – Cake should have a alphanumeric+whitespace validation rule. On the surface the need for this type of rule seems to make sense, but as Joel Perras points out in the Google Group it’s a fairly uncommon scenario. Actually, I can’t think of when I’d actually use this rule – post a comment if you have.

This also opens up an opportunity for someone in the community to make an awesome behavior (packaged as a plugin, of course) that encapsulates a bunch of random, bonus validation rules. Joel even gets you started by providing a “alnumWhitelist” rule. Whose gonna run with this?

In The Wild

F-E-E-D-Z.com

This one has actually been up for awhile, but I held of until the bakery article stabilized. F-E-E-D-Z is a feed directory.

Dropfood.com

Dropfood is a recipe aggregation site, at least that’s what I’m inferring since there isn’t a description anywhere. It seems to be moderated, so only select recipes are included. Clicking on one brings you to a framed site with the recipe and diggbar like bar for Dropfood.

Cyclingnews

I’m not 100% sure this one is Cake site, but @frodosghost heard that it is. Good enough for me.
Unlike the two sites mentioned above, Cyclyingnews.com has original content and focuses on…wait for it…cycling news! It’s pics like this and this that make me wish I had spent less time trying to jump shit with my bike as a kid and instead just rode for a really long time. Plus, I could finally wear my shirt like this and people at work wouldn’t give me funny looks.

In The Blogs

Vanity Routing

Let’s say you have a site, we’ll call it FaceSpace in this example, where you want to have “www.facespace.com/vanity” route to a particular controller. But you also want to make sure that your actual controller urls still route correctly. lecterror has a quick tip on how to accomplish this.

Two from Debuggable

The first is a cool little shell that can be used to clear cache. If you’re going to actually implement this though, I’d use the version that Joel Perras rolled into a plugin. Joel’s version is also updated to use the CakePHP clearCache function.

The second post from Debuggable is a quick intro on unit tests in CakePHP and has some good links on getting started.

Sending Email with GMail

Marc Grabanski has a post on using the SwiftMailer component to send email via Gmail. Another way to do this, assuming you have control over your server, is to install msmtp and set your sendmail_path in php.ini to use it. I’ll post about it if anyone’s interested.

Simplifying Controller with Exceptions

Mark Story has a post of using PHP’s try…catch() handling to clean up controllers and components.

Code

AutoLogin Component

I should have mentioned this one in the last digest, but completely wiffed. Miles Johnson released an AutoLogin component which allows you to add a checkbox to your login form, so that returning visitors can bypass the login.

Commentable Behavior

Jose Diaz-Gonzalez released a behavior to allow comments to be tied to any model.

Filter Component

Ever wanted to apply a filter to your paginated list? James Fairhurst makes it easy with his Filter Component. Unfortunately there’s no download for this one, so be prepared to ctrl-c and ctrl-v.

CouchDB

If you’re into non-relational databases you might want to check out this Couch DB datasource from Chris Hartjes. Or take a look at the improved version from Gwoo.

Interactive Plugin for the DebugKit and Console

This is one of mine. The Interactive Plugin lets you quickly run commands against your Cake app. I saved about 30 minutes of debugging using this to fix an issue today.

I’m Out!

Don’t forget to subscribe to my feed or follow me on twitter.

As always if you think I missed something leave a comment. Or if you do something interesting and want it included in the next digest, send me an email.

The Book

For anyone who missed it, I released a free CakePHP book a month ago. Since then it’s been downloaded over 2500 times. I’ve also received some great feedback and have made a bunch of corrections to the code and grammar. The biggest change is that the table of contents is now links and will jump you right to the section. That’s reason enough alone to grab the updated version. The new permanent home page for the book is here.

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I teased this on twitter last week, so here’s the official release. The interactive plugin is a super easy way to run code against your Cake app. You can use it either through a custom panel in the DebugKit or from the command line as a shell.

Download

Get it at GitHub

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Preface

I’m going to be in the minority here, but I really didn’t like the new Star Trek movie. It’s currently at 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. Wow! Really? Did I see the same movie as everyone else? Let’s get right into it…

This review is full of spoilers…I don’t make any effort to mark them or hide them. Read at your own risk.

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In The Blogs

There were a ton of really good blog posts in the last couple weeks, so pretty much this entire digest is going to be blog posts.

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