CakePHP Digest #22 - Don't Go Away Mad...Just Go Away

Posted by Matt on Mon, Nov 23 2009

News

CakeFest IV - Somewhere, America

The Cake team is looking for suggestions for the next CakeFest, which will take place somewhere in the U.S.A. I vote for my backyard. There's a 50/50 chance I could actually make it then.

addons.mozilla.org dumping CakePHP

The most trafficked CakePHP site has announced plans to switch to the PHP framework Django. Wait, Django is only for Python? So they're not only switching frameworks, but re-coding the whole site? They must have some real issues with CakePHP 1.2 and 1.3 to be making such a drastic change. Oh, they're still running 1.1? Don't you at least take a shot at upgrading before making such a major change? That's like switching to Snow Puppy from Vista without even trying Win7. That's right Cake is Windows in this scenario. Anyone have a problem with that?

Once addons.mozilla.org is gone (also xplodsony.com is gone too), what will be the largest Cake site in terms of visits/pageviews? Post your site with average monthly visits and pageviews in the comments. Winner will get a prominent mention in the next digest, plus a feature in a future digest when it inevitably moves to Django.

CakePHP 1.3 Alpha

CakePHP 1.3 looks pretty awesome. If I had a high traffic site that cataloged addons for a popular internet browser, that was still running 1.1, I would think about upgrading to this version. Just tossing that out there.

In The Wild

blackbooksingles.com

Hmmm...blackbooksingles.com (announced via their twitter account) is free online dating site built with CakePHP. Sound familiar?

hardwoodinfo.com

From @nezencreation: The American Hardwood Information Center. If you still find boner jokes funny (and who doesn't!), go to the homepage and read the rotating flash part and pretend all the text is about THAT kind of hardwood. My favorite: "Nature's Brilliance Has Created A Magnificent Material - Eco-Friendly, Durably, Asthetically[sic] Pleasing". I can neither confirm nor deny that this kept for entertained for a solid ten minutes.

andrw.net

A Croogo powered blog from @andruu: andrw.net and damn is it sweet looking. I have to be careful and not say too much nice stuff or WordPress will get jealous and take down my server.

In The Blogs

Ajax Pagination in 1.3

Mark Story has a post showing how to do Ajax pagination with Mootools in CakePHP 1.3. Although it seems like it would be just as easy to do with any of the other supported JavaScript frameworks. We could be seeing this in our favorite browser addons catalog in a matter of days if they didn't need to switch the entire underlying framework and coding language first. Instead it'll be roughly 2012 before they're back to 50% of the functionality they have now.

Routing Explained

If you've read the Cookbook entry and the "Secrets of Admin Routing" article and still don't get it, now we also have "Routing Explained". No more routing articles. I'm putting my foot down. Unless you still really, really don't get it. Then you get one more. But that's it. And then right to bed for you.

Get rid of .htaccess

Ryan Pendergast has a nice article on the bakery showing to speed up your Cake site by moving the mod_rewrite rules that are in your .htaccess file to Apache's config. Another speed up tip: Remove Apache, along with your .htaccess files and install Nginx.

Code

Archivable Behavior

Sohaib Muneer release a new Archivable Behavior. It's kind of like some of the "Soft Deletable" behaviors that are floating around, expect instead of flagging the row in the database it moved it to another table, so that the original table doesn't get too cluttered. I like to call this "The Table of Misfit Rows".

Searchable Plugin

This one is from Neil Crookes. It's a plugin for doing site searches, without having to rely on a search engine. I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but I have no doubt it's completely awesome.

I'm Out!

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.

Posted in CakePHP Digest

14 Comments

Gordon said on Nov 23, 2009

Doesn't 1.2 address all of their complaints except for backtraces?

Mark Story said on Nov 24, 2009

No backtraces are provided by the Debugger as well. You just have to click the "Error" link. Thanks for the mention again Matt, and yes you could do that pagination tutorial with any Javascript library, I just chose mootools because I like it.

Andrew said on Nov 24, 2009

Thanks for the mention. Always love the CakePHP Digests... currently I'm receiving around 80 page views/day I think I'm up there for most trafficked site :)

hausburger said on Nov 24, 2009

> 12M PIs/month

Neil Crookes said on Nov 24, 2009

@matt, you missed the simple but groovy Youtube support I added to the gdata plugin last night http://github.com/neilcrookes/gdata and the habtm counter cache behavior with scope http://gist.github.com/235599 ;-)

Dirk Olbertz said on Nov 24, 2009

The problem with updating Cake 1.1 to 1.2 or 1.3 is, that Cake 1.1 lacked a lot of things that then were mostly done by the developers of the WebApp that uses CakePHP. Updating to Cake 1.2 or 1.3 then in some cases may be the same effort than rewriting the App completely - and every developer on some point just wants to rewrite everything, so that might be an excellent start.

I know of at least two large CakePHP projects, where a rewrite in another language is more probably than updating to Cake 1.2 or 1.3.

Matt said on Nov 24, 2009

I think you've probably hit on the real reason. They should have just said: "Cake 1.1 was kindy sucky so we hacked the fuck out of it. It's pretty much impossible to upgrade anyway and we all really want to try out Django, so we're making the change." Instead they tossed out the same reasons they used to convince the bosses.

Sean McEmerson said on Nov 24, 2009

One of my very first sites built with Cake was getting upwards of 20,000 views per day. It was for a band I worked with for years but their label has taken over the site now and I don't have access to the analytics anymore so I don't have any up-to-date info.

Stef said on Nov 24, 2009

Although visit stats are confidential, I suspect that www.cyclingnews.com is the biggest CakePHP site in the world. Moreover, www.totalfilm.com, another of Future's sites, is also built in CakePHP.

Djiize said on Nov 24, 2009

If I remember well, the site for Miss Universe is built with Cake:
http://www.missuniverse.com/
They had the cake favicon before, but removed it.
The /pages/home test doesn't work, but there's a /js/vendors.php file...
And this link tells about Cake : http://www.missuniverse.com/test.php
I dont' know its stats, but I'm pretty sure it has a good audience.

Miles Johnson said on Nov 24, 2009

Great digest, need more! I should probably finish the rest of my scripts.

My site gets decent traffic: http://www.sc2armory.com/app/webroot/mint/

abhishek said on Nov 25, 2009

hey this is nice blog all dedicated to cakephp...but a little simplification will newbies more
good luck

Mike Cook said on Nov 27, 2009

It's a shame addons.mozilla.org is dumping CakePHP. Still re-coding a whole site will keep them busy.

I'm not surprised people are reluctant to give their traffic numbers, and neither will I. Still, for interests sake epubBooks.com runs on CakePHP.

Nazmul Hassan said on Dec 07, 2009

Hey

i have your post "Integrating Facebook Connect with CakePHP’s Auth component" from the link "http://planetcakephp.org/aggregator/items/1913-integrating-facebook-connect-with-cakephp%E2%80%99s-auth-component". The post was really helpful. Thanks for the post.

my question is, where to place the xd_receiver.htm?

Bye
Nazmul Hassan