Previously On...

I've decided to do bi-weekly posts about the latest happenings in the CakePHP world. I'm starting with #3, since Christian Winther had previously done #1-#2 on his blog. I emailed Christian to make sure he was cool with me picking this up, so in the same vein, when I fade out around digest #6 anyone reading this can feel free to pick up the ball and walk with it (don't run though, the ball is made of scissors).

News

At the beginning of the month the 2nd CakeFest took place in Buenos Aires. All the cool kids were there, drinking beers and talking Cake. I missed it, but I'm ready for CakeFest 27 in 5-7 years (with time off for good behavior).

For those who missed it or just want to re-create the entire experience here's some simple steps:
1) Print out each of the pics from the event and hang them in your cell/cube.
2) Grab a copy of the slides from two of the talks (or read write-ups of all the talks).
3) I usually re-enact the presentations with impersonations of the presenters based on what I think they're like. You can simply read the slides - it's up to you.

Tickets and Commits

Instead of simply listing all the commits and tickets, I'm going to try to summarize the current status and maybe point out a few import items. Unfortuatly my plan was shot to hell because there is only one open ticket for CakePHP 1.2. It's hard to summarize one thing. Now I'm going to have to spend the next 6 months earning commit privileges so I can submit some buggy code and have something to summarize.

On the commit side, there have been 21 revisions since December 1st, closing 6 tickets. Mark Story was the most active committer, although he may just be making meaningless changes to get his commit count up so his boss thinks he's busy. Not that I'd know anything about that.

In The Wild

This is the part where I mention newly launched CakePHP sites. Nothing new on the official CakePHP "Sites in the wild" page since December 1. I could plug my own shit, but that seems kind of lame. Leave a comment if you launched a new CakePHP site in the last two weeks or send me an email if you are launching one soon.

In The Blogs

This ven diagram from Debuggable.com caused quite a stir, as some people missed the scientific nature of the diagram and took it for simple humor.

There were also a couple interesting posts about handling environment specific settings in Cake apps. Personally I'm a fan of having a "bootstrap.local.php" file that isn't stored in SVN and is included in the normal bootstrap file. There's no sex appeal to this method though, so if you don't want to be standing alone in the corner while everyone else dances the night away, I suggest you read the posts by Neil Crookes, Chris Hartjes and Rafael Bandeira.

In The Groups

The topic of unit testing came up twice(1, 2), which make sense since CakePHP 1.2 unit testing can be a bit...uh tricky. As an aside: when you have kid(s) it's natural to try to limit the amount of cursing you do in front of them. This has led to me saying "oh my goodness" instead of my usual colorful language. When I was learning the CakePHP unit testing I said "oh my goodness" a lot.</aside>

The other hot topic, that accumulated 21 diggs...er...messages, was about cakephp.org being down. I'd like to congratulate the entire CakePHP team on this accomplishment, since we all know that downtime is directly related to the popularity of the project...just ask jQuery. Thanks, you're a great crowd. Please remember to tip your server.

In The Bakery

Nothing new in the last two weeks, which isn't surprising with CakeFest happening, and the fact that every topic or piece of code that could be of any use to anyone has already been done. Seriously, give me one code related idea that hasn't already been beaten into the ground. Why do you think I'm writing this stupid digest? I haven't had a good post idea in weeks.

And on that note 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.