News

This is my third digest and for the first time there isn't a clear lead story. I was going to go with gwoo's message that CakePHP 1.2 had received close to 25k downloads in the first 6 days of its release. That works out to 1.5 million downloads extrapolated over a full year. Actual download rate will likely taper off - I just wanted to use the word extrapolate.

Also of interest was Daniel Hofstetter's (cakebaker) declaration of his framework free agency (on twitter too). But then his first post after this announcement was about CakePHP. Since that post launched a fairly long comment thread let's skip right to...

Tickets and Commits

The debate on cakebaker's blog centers around whether bugs (for the stable release) should be accepted without test cases. The census seems to be that the Cake devs are too strict and close valid defects with "needmoreinfo." I can see both sides of this. Some of the defects referenced in cakebaker's post SEEM clear and valid, but were closed anyway. For example: #5943, #5946 and #5951. These have all since been re-opened, but won't be worked on until a test case is provided. You can see the full report of these type of tickets here.

On other hand take ticket #5960. Although to the poster the ticket may be clear and there is code attached, how long would it take someone to actually understand what's going on, especially with some of the comments being in another language?

So is it better to have a clear policy universally applied to all bugs or for the devs to make arbitrary decisions on which ones they'll make an effort to understand? Either way someone's going to bitch about it.

In The Wild

A bunch of new sites to talk about. The first demolistic.com by Tyler (I don't have a blog link or twitter account. Tyler if you read this ping me for a link). Tyler wrote about his experience building the site on The Bakery. A competing site to Tyler's Demolistic is MakeFive.com (not a CakePHP site (that I know)). One of the creators of MakeFive wrote a post called "Why your web startup will fail," which has nothing to do with CakePHP, but I thought was a good article so I made a tenuous connection to it through Demolistic, which is CakePHP related.

Also written up in the bakery is Jeffery's releasedatez.com. I recently launched a similar site, so I'll give Jeffery some friendly advice. As great as you think the site is, 99% of the three people that try your site will forget about it with in a day of first using it. Right now it appears the only way to see if an item released is to log back in. You need way more ways of notification: email, rss, facebook to start. Also everyone should make sure to check out the screen cast on the about page. The narrator (Jeffrey I assume) has that whispery, calm serial killer voice. When CakePHP digest #6 isn't published in two weeks, you can assume I'm tied to a chair listening a description of how my innards are going to be made into balloon animals while I watch.

In The Blogs

I always like to read posts about little Cake functions that I didn't know existed. I still remember the first time I read about Set::extract - it was like I was 10 years old and discovering Halloween (the movie) all over again. cakealot has a quick post explaining the String::insert that is worth checking out.

Chris Hartjes has a nice post refuting pretty much everything said in this post comparing CakePHP and symfony. Kudos to Chris for his post, but mostly for actually getting through the original comparison. I started to read it to see what quippy little jokes I could make, but slipped into a 20 year coma after 3 lines. Fortunately WordPress version 47.3 has a cool feature where you can back publish posts and they will actually appear back in time, which is why you are able to read this.

In The Groups

The Yii framework published report of performance benchmarks comparing the top PHP frameworks. Pretty much anything intelligent that needed to be said was covered in this discussion - which still leaves me plenty of room for unintelligent slams. Like this one: Watch now as I invalidate the entire results of the comparison with one sentence QUOTED DIRECTLY OFF THEIR PAGE. You ready? "each application is written such that a single die('hello world'); statement is placed in the default controller action of each application." Check out the CakePHP controller used.
The Yii Framework: Just when you thought "Hello World" couldn't run any faster.™

I feel obligated to link to this thread, a debate about X/HTML standards, which is educational, entertaining and horrible depressing all at the same time.

This thread linked to one of most perplexing programs I've seen in awhile, the ModelBaker application. Basically they took the Cake console, made a GUI (that runs in OS X only) added a few extra features and are selling it for $399. But then they didn't really dumb down any of the Cake lingo, so you still essentially have to learn Cake before you can use it. I spent 4 hours on their site and figured out the target audience is someone with enough programming skill that they understand MVC and CakePHP, uses OS X, doesn't like the command line and only wants to produce CRUD apps.

In The Bakery

There were a ton of new articles in the Bakery, but only one really stood out to me. I was going to make fun of this article, but it's since been pulled from the bakery. So instead I'll mock the original source. The idea is to use "lorem ipsum" text throughout your application, then replace that with the actual text using CSS selectors and JavaScript. Frankly the whole concept is so absurd, I'm going to assume this is an elaborate practical joke. Like the author is going to build a huge install base, then release a version where all the text is replaced with "The developer who built this site was dropped as a child. Several times. On their head. Contact tobiasz.cudnik@gmail.com for competent web development."

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.