• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

Define The Problem

In the past, I’ve done some freelance Web Development and Web Design for different clients. One question I’ve always had to ask myself is:

How will the user be updating this website?

That question is usually preempted by a question to the client:

Do you have any HTML experience?

I can count (on one hand) the number of times that I’ve heard a yes to this question. To be quite honest, I don’t even know why I ask it anymore. Hardly any of my clients  ever had HTML experience and even if they did, I doubt they’d want to go through the hassle. So this poses the very interesting question How do you pick a CMS (content management system) for a web project?

What Not To Do – Pure HTML is wrong for many reasons

Over the years, I’ve had much experience in this area (what not to do). Gone are the days when people simply wanted a web presence. Those days, things were simple. You fire up your copy of Frontpage (oh how we’ve learned from then) and designed a website for a client and stick it onto an FTP server, and viola; you’re done. Worst case scenario, they call you up seven (7) months later and say they’ve changed their phone number and need you to make an update.

That might have been fine back then, but right now clients expect a lot more for their money. In this day and age when everyone is worried about SEO ranking and the phrase Content Is King has been coined, no one wants to have to call you up (and God forbid; pay you) to make regular updates to their website. It is expected that you provide some sort method of updating their site.

With that said, providing a purely HTML solution is not user friendly and it can be down right dangerous. Do you really want to give your users full access to the HTML files that comprise the website? What if they break something in the layout while editing in Microsoft Word, ugh!. Who would be to blame? You would.

In the past I’ve guarded against this by using the PHP include strategy. The website would be primarily PHP with a folder called “content” sitting there with various HTML files. From there, I would pull any dynamic content that would be needed for the site: Page titles, tag lines, content blocks, etc, using standard PHP includes. This way my layout would stay (relatively) intact and the user would have access to change what they were allowed to change. The problem with this method is that they required some sort of HTML knowledge to modify the content files. They also required knowledge of FTP software and servers. Not to mention, that adding a pages or sections still needed heavy interaction from myself. Needless to say, I’ve grown from then.

Joomla! – It looked like a good idea at first

Early in my college days, I stumbled across Mambo and subsequently Joomla!, it’s current fork. It did so much for you, it had to be good, right? After installing Joomla for a client, I realized what the problem was. It just did too much. There were too many configurations, and simple things were just too hard. Also, last I remember, one of the main navigational structures was generated using and ugly and rigid table structure. Yes, I know it’s been changed by now, but that was part of my initial frustration.

It just felt too heavy for a normal website. No matter how much I restricted the user (by groups – editors as opposed to admins I think) I still got complaints about how complicated the backend interface it was. Added to that fact, the templates (and I stress) at that time were very cookie-cutter. It got to the point where I could eyeball a website built in Joomla.

Since then (over 3 years ago) I haven’t given Joomla a second look. It’s just one of those things that rubs you the wrong way once, and you never look back. Judging by the version numbers, I’m forced to assume that not much has changed. But that’s just an ignorant assumption with no basis, so please don’t hold it against me.

More To Come

I really had no idea this was going to be as long as it turned out. But sometimes I start ranting and never end. Hense, there shall be a part two where I talk about my dive into WordPress.

All user input is encouranged; ThanX

• Reader Input: Picking A CMS – Part 3
• Content Management Systems
• Spell Out a Detailed Contract
• Nail in The Coffin – Mamboserver.com Hacked
• Reader Input: Picking A CMS – Part 2

After Pascal, I was looking into something visual. Hence, I fell into Visual Basic 5.0. Yeah, I know, I’m sorry.

Legal Issues

Now this was my first step towards the open source community. I must admit, that I downloaded a pirated copy and ran with it for a while. Now, that was all well and good when I was sitting home playing around with stuff. But when it came to actually, to producing something for a market, you can’t (or should I say, shouldn’t) do that with pirated software.

After that, I got into web development. For this, there was a plethora of free tools available, for use. So I did that for a while. When I got back to college, I got into C++ (using Visual Studio, but still essentially free). That was a step in the right direction. However, as the semesters went on, we got more into using the .NET library. However, for my web development I never got into ASP.

The First Real Plunge into Open Source – Enter PHP

Bit by bit, web development gave way to web programming. This is where PHP came in. I got more familiar with PHP when I started working on different projects for clients. I chose PHP for a few main reasons:

1. Free Documentation: I could learn almost everything I needed through online documentation.
2. Cost: My first problem was hosting. ASP hosts used to be almost twice as expensive as their Linux counterparts.

The Open Source Misconception

One of the problems that people have with Open Source is that they think that it’s unsupported. People seem to think that open source software is written by a bunch of kids in basements or something. This is not the case, by any means.  For example, a lot of the Linux distributions are totally free and totally supported.  Wake up people; free doesn’t mean unsupported. The whole “You get what you pay for” isn’t always true.

Why I Use Open Source Software

For my personal web development, I run a very small team and we do work part time. This is no time to shell out $6,000 for a standard license of SQL Server 2005. MySQL server 5.0 is a very robust database server. It should be able to handle itself in a lot of the situations that people think they need to throw SQL Server at. Where, MySQL fails to deliver, PostgreSQL should be more than sufficient.

Open source software and products just make life easier. Take examples like, jQuery and CakePHP. Would it be possible for an in-house team to come up with the same thing? Yes, sure? But why? Especially when a team (not just one guy) has put years into one special product. The price of the software does not dictate it’s quality.

What Not To Do

Now, one word of wisdom: All open source software isn’t the same. You need to do your research before diving into open source. Look up research about the product’s history, community support, and most importantly the support. If you run a very small shop, then almost anything will work for you; especially since you’re main goal would be to keep costs down.

However, a large company should not thumb their nose at open source software either. Unless you have a team dedicated to doing one task, and doing it well, why not utilise a tried and true method? Why do we always feel the need to reinvent the wheel? Seriously, your team may be extremely skilled, but can you guys really crank out a better Javascript Framework than jQuery? I doubt it.

Take a hint from one of the largest; Microsoft has recenlty started shipping jQuery with their .NET 3.5 framework. They even have intellisense support for it in Visual Studio. Open source is the way of the future, as long as we learn to use it correctly.

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• New Domain: WebDevelopment2.com, New Focus: Frameworks, CakePHP, Javascript, Web 2.0

You’re Out On Your Own

The problem right now is that, you’re all on your own. You need to describe your data on your own. So, on with it:

Here’s your model code:

class Contact extends AppModel {
	var $name = 'Contact';
	var $useTable = false;  // Not using the database, of course.

	// All the fancy validation you could ever want.
	var $validate = array(
	    'name' => array(
	        'rule' => '/.+/',
			'allowEmpty' => false,
	        'required' => true,
	    ),
		'subject' => array(
	        'rule' => array('minLength', 5),
			'message' => 'Subject must be 5 characters long'
	    ),
		'email' => array(
	        'rule' => 'email',
			'message' => 'Please enter a valid email address'
	    ),
	);

	// This is where the magic happens
	function schema() {
		return array (
			'name' => array('type' => 'string', 'length' => 60),
			'email' => array('type' => 'string', 'length' => 60),
			'message' => array('type' => 'text', 'length' => 2000),
			'subject' => array('type' => 'string', 'length' => 100),
		);
	}
}

What The User Sees

I think the model’s the hardest part. The view is ridiculous:

	echo $form->create(null, array('action' => 'index'));
	echo $form->input('name');
	echo $form->input('email');
	echo $form->input('subject');
	echo $form->input('message');
	echo $form->submit();
	echo $form->end();

I know; you’re disappointed right? Sorry.

How Do We Control All This?

So, here’s your controller. I was going to leave that up to you, but it’s so simple that I can’t help it:

class ContactController extends AppController
{
	var $name = 'Contact';
	var $uses = 'Contact';
	var $helpers = array('Html', 'Form', 'Javascript');
	var $components = array('Email', 'Session');
	function index(){
		if(isset($this->data)) {
			$this->Contact->create($this->data);
			// There is no save(), so we need to validate manually.
			if($this->Contact->validates()){
				$this->Email->to = Configure::read('CONTACT_EMAIL');
				$this->Email->replyTo = $this->data['Contact']['email'];
				$this->Email->from = $this->data['Contact']['name'].' <'.$this->data['Contact']['email'].'>';
				$this->Email->subject = 'Contact Form: '.$this->data['Contact']['subject'];
				//$this->Email->delivery = 'debug';
				if ($this->Email->send($this->data['Contact']['message'])) {
					$this->Session->setFlash('Thank you for contacting us');
					//$this->redirect('/');
				} else {
					$this->Session->setFlash('Mail Not Sent');
				}
				$this->redirect(array('action' => 'index'));
			} else {
				$this->Session->setFlash('Please Correct Errors');
				//$this->redirect('/contacts');
			}
		}
	}
}

After I got halfway through this, I remembered that Snook had written something very similar, sorry J.

There’s one subtle difference that I’ve noticed, that I need to point out.
var $_schema as apposed to function schema(). In the original CakePHP code, one of the major actions of Model::function() is to return var Model::$_shema. So, Tom-ay-to/Tom-a-to; it really doesn’t matter.

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I just think that some of the stuff in there warrants some explanation.

isAuthorized()

This function is needed when $this-Auth->authorize = ‘controller’. Theory has it, you can do something similar in app_model if $this-Auth->authorize = ‘model’, but I haven’t looked into this.

The thing that confused me about this is that I thought you were required to perform your own validation. But oh no, this is additional authorization. Sort of like what beforeSave() does, where you can cancel the save after the validation. isAuthorized() is performed after the user has been logged in. If after that, you need some additional stuff, then you can put it in there. I’m not sure why it doesn’t default to return true like beforeSave() (if everything goes well), but if it’s not present, it errors out.

$this->Auth->user(‘group_id’)

In my User Model I have a field called group_id. So you guessed it, this just returns the group_id of the user that’s logged in. Things couldn’t be simpler.

$this->Auth->userScope = array(‘User.active’ => 1)

userScope is simply used as an added set of conditions and it behaves exactly the same way that $conditions works with the Model::find() function. So what I got about says that the user must be active to login.

So there you go. Happy Baking!

Get $100 in FREE Links.

• CakePHP Auth Component For Dummies Tutorial
• CakePHP Auth Component – Will You Remember Me Tomorrow?
• New HTML Group Reinventing HTML
• CakePHP Bake – Baking Models, Controllers and Views the CakePHP 1.2 Way
• CakePHP 1.2 Beta Released Fresh Out of The Oven – Happy New Year

So I know what you’re thinking; I’m probably the last person to finally figure out the CakePHP’s Auth Component. For the past few months, I’ve been using obAuth because that’s the only authentication I could get to work with CakePHP. I think that I was just making it more difficult than it should have been.

My main resource for learning the Auth Component has been Chris’s tutorial, but even then I still needed help. Also, I’m the type that doesn’t really learn much without code.

Note that I’m running off of the CaekPHP 1.2 beta.

Getting Started

Now you can modify this however you like, but I’m starting out with the basics. You’re going to need the following:

• A user database with fields username, password. Of course they don’t need to be named that way, but defaults are fun.
• A User Model with Controller and Views – This can be baked from CakePHP
• A login view for the user.
• And a base app_controller.php. That’s it.

The Setup – app_controller and users_controller

So here’s the minimum in app_controller:

var $components = array('Auth');

function beforeFilter(){
	$this->Auth->loginAction = array('controller' => 'users', 'action' => 'login');
	$this->Auth->loginRedirect = array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'display', 'home');
	$this->Auth->allow('display');
	$this->Auth->authorize = 'controller';
}
function isAuthorized() {
	return true;
}

You can always visit the API for a better understanding of what’s going on, but right now we’re just trying to get stuff working.

After that there’s the users_controller.php. This you can get straight out of CakePHP’s baking. You do need a small modification:

function login()
{
}

function logout(){
	$this->Session->setFlash('Logout');
	$this->redirect($this->Auth->logout());
}

Brief Explanation

Honestly, it’s magic; automagic to be precise. If you want to know how it works, you can read up in the API. But what I will do, is give you some of the magic words.

$this->Auth->authorize = ‘controller’

There are different types of authorization action (ugh – ACL stuff), CRUD (basically locks up all the editing stuff), and controller (gives you some need control). Hey, sorry I don’t know too much of what it does, just what I need.

$this->Auth->loginAction = array(‘controller’ => ‘users’, ‘action’ => ‘login’)

This tells yo what the login page is. It also controls where the user is redirected to if he’s not authorized to view a page.

$this->Auth->loginRedirect = array(‘controller’ => ‘pages’, ‘display’ => ‘home’)

Self explanatory: default action to redirect the user to when logged in if they go straight to the login page. If, however, they tried to access a restricted page then this will be ignored and when they login they’ll be redirected to where they wanted to go to.

$this->Auth->allow(array(‘display’))

This is one of the magic functions. By default, adding the authentication component locks down all actions, except the login and logout. This is your way of telling the component let me in to the ‘display’ action for every controller. You at least want to see the homepage right?

You can also add to this in the beforeFilter() of each controller you you need (don’t forget the parent::beforeFilter() to make sure the Auth stuff is still called). Likewise there’s a $this->Auth->deny(), which does the reverse. One small tip: you can also use allow(array(‘*’)) to allow everything.

User Controller

For right now, the login() action can be left as is. The Auth Component handles all that foot work beautifully. You just need to make sure you call $this->Auth->logout() in your logout() action. It has the added benefit of returning the Auth’s logoutRedirect, so $this->redirect($this->Auth->logout() works great.

There you have it, I hope that helps. Now if you’re still having a hard time, I got a present for you:

There you’ll find some code, to get you up and running. It’s slightly different from what I got above (some extra stuff), but it’s heavily documented.

Enjoy and Happy Baking!

Finally on DreamHost and Loving you Dreamhost. You should check them out!

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There have been some nice changes which have gone through all through the Christmas season. Guys, I thank you for your dedication. The one major thing I’m excited about is the way that the Form Helper now processes dates and times; there’s no longer a cleanUpFields() function, everything is automatic (or should I say automagic). You’ll have modify your code since the result in $this->data is slightly different. There’s been some stuff deprecated and some stuff added.

The Model::generateList() function has also be deprecated, in favor of Model::find(‘list’). It’s not an exact duplicate of generateList() but it gets the job done. Check out the cakebaker for more essential tips for upgrading from CakePHP 1.2 pre-beta to the fresh new CakePHP 1.2 beta.

Enjoy and Happy Baking!

Get $100 in FREE Links.

• CakePHP Auth Component For Dummies Tutorial
• Cute CakePHP Trick of the Day – GenerateList Empty Slot In List
• CakePHP Auth Component – Tutorial Two
• CakePHP Contact Form – Quick and Dirty
• Enter CakePHP – Rapid Development Framework – No Really!

Sorry for the rant, back to my point. Sharan over on the CakePHP mailing list has made the process of finding the latest CakePHP information a lil’ bit easier. Using Yahoo Pipes, he’s taken feeds the most popular CakePHP RSS feeds and consolidated them into one giant feed – http://feeds.feedburner.com/cakephp. The great thing is that he’s also taken some of the non-english blog feeds and slapped on some translation. What more could you want?

I’m not sure how much the author values his privacy, so if you want to get in contact with him and/or view the Yahoo Pipes source for this feed, head over to the CakePHP mailing list and search for: “http://pipes.yahoo.com/sharanbrar/cakephp”. If you think that their’s a blog missing, just leave a comment here and I’ll route it to the author.

Happy Baking!

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• FeedBurner + Google search cache = Instant Blog Back Up
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• Web Development 2.0 Carnival – September 24, 2007

I’ve always wondered why no one has included something like this for Javascript, since that’s usually the bigger culprit when we’re talking about document size. I’ve tried using Minify in the past. However, it took a lot to get it working right. And I really hate hacking stuff just to work with CakePHP. That, coupled with the fact that I’m a lazy bastard, meant that I gave up the Minify train rather quickly.

Mark Story To The Rescue – JSMIN Javascript Helper

At the time, I hadn’t heard about the JSMIN library, which does pretty much the same thing the Minify does, but without the CSS. Luckily, Mr. Story had some vision after his Christmas festivities and cake up with a JSMin Helper for CakePHP. This helper works by Minifying the chosen Javascript. This involves stripping unnecessary characters (line breaks, comments, spaces, etc) from the .JS file.

It also includes functionality to cache the resulting files. What more can you ask for?

Usage:

// Using the link:
echo $jsmin->link('myJS');
// Link with array of files:
echo $jsmin->link(array('file1', 'file2', 'file3'));
// Using a codeblock:
echo $jsmin->codeBlock("alert('javascript');");

The only slight caveat is that PHP 5.0 is required for the JSMin library, but who still runs PHP 4 anyway?

Mr. Mark, we thank you.

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Before I start let me say that CakePHP is great. I love it to death. Currently, I’m coding a semester long class project for a friend. I’m trying to illustrate just how much faster it is to create a web application using CakePHP than anything else the other students are using.

The Project

The project consists of computerizing some department of the local university. What she’s chosen is to computerize the Audio Visual Department. Specifically the process of submitting equipment requests to the department so they can take the equipment to different classes.

The Competition

The other students are using things like C#, Visual Basic, and other high level programming languages. With all these things, you need to design an interface (and everything else for that matter) from scratch.

You’re also on your own when it comes to controls and binding them to the database fields. Not to mention, you need to do all the database relationships by yourself. The other problem is that the project is a multi-user application by definition. That means a central database. This is generally more difficult to implement on a desktop application. The project, to me, just screams Web App!

The good thing though, is that the database is the same no matter what the language.

The Easy Button – Like Staples

Enter CakePHP.

• Install CakePHP
• Configure the database
• Bake the models, controllers and views.
• Modify the Add for the request so that it more closely fits the project description. This involves creating requests that span across a range of dates.

Um, that’s it. Your done!

Right now, I’m working on making it pretty. The professors, so far, have seemed pretty impressed with the progress made in such a short amount of time. There’s even talk about being a guest speaker to introduce CakePHP to the class.

This just goes to show. You need something done fast CakePHP will get you there in no time.

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When it comes to WYSIWYG editors, they are a dime a dozen. There is of course the world famous TinyMCE. There is already an article in the bakery on how to use TinyMCE with CakePHP. There’s htmlArea and even openWYSIWYG.

Although I generally love TinyMCE, for my last project I needed to give the user the option to upload images. FCKeditor is the only editor that offers this functionality for free. Some say that it’s bloated, but you can always trim it down to only what you need. Actually the new (October 10th, 2007) version is pretty snazzy. They’ve done away with the font tag and just made it a lot cleaner.

Dump It In And Configure

Pretty simple. You download FCKeditor and dump it in the webroot/js folder. That’s it. How easy is that? If you want to get file and image uploads working, there’s a small configuration that you need to change.

1. Find the following file: fckeditor\editor\filemanager\connectors\php\config.php
2. Set $Config['Enabled'] to true.
3. Set $Config['UserFilesPath'] to the path that you’re browsing to, relative to the root folder. If you’re going straight to the images folder, and not allowing users to browse elsewhere, this needs to be ‘/images’. This is what it uses to create the src and href attributes of your tags, so make sure they match what they should.
4. Most importantly, $Config['UserFilesAbsolutePath'] needs to point to the absolute path. You could get away with not entering it, but then your URLs come out all funky.
5. Check the configurations at the bottom of the file to make sure they match what you want. For example, I usually change $Config['FileTypesPath']['Image'] to map to images instead of image.

Set Up the Element

Now there is an article in the bakery that talks about integrating CakePHP with FCKeditor. They use a fancy element that replaces only the textarea you want it to.

Well, this was written for CakePHP 1.1 and the modifications listed for CakePHP 1.2 doesn’t work for me. In any case, it’s not that important. I just use an element that replaces all TextAreas on the screen. Things are simpler that way .

So here’s my element: fckeditor.ctp:

[JAVASCRIPT]

[/JAVASCRIPT]

I simply dump this right after my $form->end() or something like that. It doesn’t really matter.

An there you have it. CakePHP and FCKEditor. Have fun with it.

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Patty Cake, Patty Cake, Baker’s Man

One of the things that sold me on CakePHP is the bake routine. This is basically code generation for the lazy types like myself. It was good in CakePHP version 1.1, now it’s just awesome. The only way they can make it better is to implement a web version, but that’s another story.

What Baking Does

In CakePHP we refer to the automatic code generation as baking (get it now?). An entire application can be baked from nothing more than a few tables in a database. CakePHP uses some skeleton templates, which you can of course customize to your needs, to generate your Models, Views and Controllers. The controllers and views come with the standard CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) functions and can also contain admin functions.

Currently, we run the Bake routine from the command line. I’m hoping sooner or later this can change, but with a lot of hosts allowing shell access to your account, this isn’t a priority with the developers.

Setting Up In Windows

Although this is not necessary, one thing I like to do is add both bake and the PHP executable to my path. To do this, we go to the Windows System Properties dialog, then the Advanced tab, and click on Environment Variables.

You find the Path system variable and add your PHP (D:\wamp\php;) and cake console (D:\wamp\www\cake\cake\console) paths, separated by semicolons.

Linux users, you haven’t Been forgotten.

Preheat the Oven

When I bake, I like to bake from scratch, so to speak. Let’s assume we’re creating a fresh new application called baz. You go to CakePHP main folder and type the following on the command line:

cake bake baz

and follow the prompts.
This will generate a new application folder called baz ready for use. After this, you would go to the application folder and set up your configurations; core.php, database.php, etc. One thing about baking an application from scratch is that it bakes the application with a new, random Security Salt variable. Pretty cool huh?

You could even bake your database configuration for the database.php file, but let’s keep not get carried away here.

Baking Models

This is the most important part of baking, the model. Because CakePHP draws all its power from from conventions, it is extremely important that your database follow the CakePHP conventions. This means table names, field names, foreign key names, plurals, etc. Head to the folder for the application: (D:\wamp\www\cake\baz) and type in:

cake bake

You could also skip the first prompt and bake the model directly:

cake bake model [model name]

Follow the prompts, bake a model, etc. At every step, you’ll be prompted for various aspects of your model. It asks you what type of validation you want for each field for the model. If your database is set up correctly, the bake routine can even detect your database associations and build them accordingly. For example, while baking the Users model, if you have a table, users that contains a field group_id, the routine will ask if the model “hasOne Group”. Say no, and it will ask if the model “hasMany Groups”. It doesn’t get easier than this.

Baking Controllers

You can go through all the prompts, but in my opinion this takes too much time for me. Here are some straight to the point commands to get you on your way:

cake bake controller Users

This bakes an empty controller using scaffolding. If you don’t know, Scaffolding is sort of like baking, except with no functions and no views. This is usually used to test of database schema, model association, model validation, etc.

cake bake controller Users scaffold

This does the same thing as the command above, except it actually creates the functions: index, add, view, edit, and delete.

cake bake controller Users scaffold admin

Again, this does the same thing as the top, but with admin_index, admin_add, admin_view, admin_edit and admin_delete functions. Starting to get the picture?

Baking Views

This couldn’t be simpler:

cake bake view Users

Creates views for all the functions created in the Users controller.

Now you could of course just use the basic bake routine and follow the prompts for every aspect of building, but I’ve found that this wastes too much time; especially with the controllers and views. You only need to pay attention for the model.

Bake applications has become priceless for me when trying to do a proof of concept of a new application for a client.

Source: CakePHP Baking [CakeBaker]

Get $100 in FREE Links.

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• Using CakePHP for A School Project – Proof of Concept

Seems like there’s a database issue. Here’s hoping that it’s not down for too long.

Update (11/20/07):

Most of the stuff is back up on the bakery. The rating is still a small issue, but all the code and tutorials are up and running.

Bake On!

Finally on DreamHost and Loving you Dreamhost. You should check them out!

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• Give Me 15 Minutes and I’ll Make You A jQuery Expert
• CakePHP Bake – Baking Models, Controllers and Views the CakePHP 1.2 Way
• Finally We’ve Moved To DreamHost – Quality Web Hosting
• Poll Results – What Do You Look for in a PHP Framework?

These arguments are not based on hard facts, since I haven’t done much research on the matter. A lot of them come from a post at Clickable Bliss discussing the PHP vs. Ruby On Rails Issue.

1. Steep Learning Curve – Laziness

   One thing I really hate is learning stuff. It is especially bothersome when you’re trying to crank out a project or web application in a limited amount of time.

   With CakePHP I’m required to learn about the MVC style of development as well as CakePHP conventions.

   With Ruby on Rails, I would have to learn MVC, Ruby on Rails conventions and I would have to start from scratch with the Ruby programming language as well.

   A lot of developers adopt the Programming Is Programming philosophy. They say that coding concepts are standard across the board; You’ve seen one language, you’ve seem em’ all!

   That may be true in general, but there was no way I was going to learn an entirely new language on the eve of project development. I’ve been meddling with PHP on and off for years now, so I feel more comfortable in the environment.

2. Setup and Deployment – More Laziness

   With CakePHP, I know I could boot up my PC download and install WAMP and be done with it. If I wasn’t home and only had my USB Disk, XAMPP Lite would serve just as well. I dump the CakePHP code into a folder, tweak my config file and I’m good to go.

   With RoR, the preferred method is downloading and installing Ruby, then installing MySQL, then installing Rails, then configuring with your web server (if you have one). You could also go the LAMP route with InstantRails, but this is less flexible.

   Deploying to customers is usually a breeze. Change the config file to point to a different database, maybe change some .htaccess files, then copy and paste. It doesn’t get much simpler. With RoR, who knows what’s involved?

3. Shared Host Support – I’m Just Cheap Like That

   This, by far, was my major turn off to Ruby On Rails. When it first hit the scene, none of the hosts that I used supported RoR. Back in the day, you would need a dedicated server to use RoR effectively.

   This wasn’t going to fly for me. I don’t do Web Development for my health or for fun. I design web applications for clients. A lot of my work involves redesign of already existing sites. How do I say to a client: Hey, although your current web host that you’ve prepaid a year for is sufficient for 90% or the stuff you can throw at it, I’m using this new technology and you need to shell out some more $$$ for a host that can handle it.

   PHP hosts are a dime a dozen. 98% (again not a hard fact, but an educated guess) of hosts that you pay for will offer at least PHP 4. Although more and more shared hosts, like Dreamhost, are supporting Ruby on Rails, they were quite scarce back when I had to make my choice of frameworks.

4. Speed

   This is going to be a touchy subject. But let me just blurt out what I’ve read: Ruby on Rails is inherently slow. There, I said it. It’s not its fault, it was created that way by design.

   Because everything in RoR is an object, it has to be instantiated, which takes up CPU time and memory. Even empty objects. With PHP and empty array is a memory address, that’s it. Although CakePHP does support OOP using PHP5, most of CakePHP’s data manipulation is still heavily array based.

   There are steps you can take to speed up RoR. Running it using Fast CGI is one option. But again we get to the point of what is a available on shared hosts. Even on dedicated hosts performance is a problem. The RoR community has taken the Throw More Hardware At It defense, but everyone doesn’t have that options. They are quite vested in Moore’s Law, which basically states that hardware performance will continue to increase exponentially, due to increases in technology.

   Even one of the developers of Twitter (huge RoR application) has expressed concern about RoR’s performance. For the rest of us of us on shared hosts or who write small/medium sized applications for clients on shared hosts, Fast CGI (if not already installed) and adding a faster CPU are luxuries that we simply do not have. I would also remind you that even Mr. Moore himself stated that the law “can’t continue forever”. There’s going to be a point when things get down the atomic sizes, then what? But anyway, that’s a whole other discussion.

   My point is, I write efficient code when I can. Other times I write “get it done” code. I can’t afford to my framework to slow me down even more than I’m going slow down myself. With these memory and CPU issues, I even wonder how shared hosts are able to provide RoR services to all their customers.

5. Object Oriented Programming

   Rails is all about OOP, from head to toe. Most times, that’s a good thing.

   There’s not much to say about this in CakePHP’s defense. Because the decision was made to support PHP4, the full power of OOP cannot be exploited. However, there are a few things to keep in mind. PHP4 development is officially dead, PHP6 is around the corner, and CakePHP is still at version 1. The future holds exponential growth for CakePHP.

   Me personally, I don’t really care. CakePHP gets the job done for me, that’s all I ask.

6. Documentation

   Fair is fair. Here, I concede. Rails has some great online documentation and even a great book out there.

   The CakePHP community lacks documentation in a major way. One of the major reasons for this is that the project is still growing so rapidly that documentation would actually hurt for two reasons: It would slow down the developers and in five (5) months it might be obsolete. Right now, we are left to hunt and peck through the API to determine how to do things or ask around in the CakePHP Group.

   As development slows down a big, the documentation will evolve. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and predict that by CakePHP 1.5, we should have some solid documentation out there. By version 2.0 we should have a book.

It’s important to note that when it comes to decisions like these, I am in no way loyal (Sorry guys). I usually vote for whatever is going to create less work for me. So far, CakePHP has been leading the forefront in “Making Less Work For Baz” so it’s two thumbs up.

Finally on DreamHost and Loving you Dreamhost. You should check them out!

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With this post I’m introducing a new segment to this blog: Cute CakePHP Trick of the Day.

This is basically going to be a learn as I learn sort of thing. There are always a bunch of little things that I want to do in CakePHP, but just haven’t figured out. So every time I stumble onto something, I’ll let you guys in on it.

I love the GenerateList() function. This is generally used when you have models with associations with other models. The GenerateList function is often used in these cases to populate a drop down list or a multiple select list. A typical example is a state drop down on an address form.

One problem that I have with this implementation is that it always produces a complete list and there is no empty slot. There is nothing to say that I don’t want to associate anything for this entry. On a drop down list, it’s impossible not to select an element. On a multiple selection list, even if the user holds CTRL and clicks to unselect the current entry, CakePHP ignores this entry.

Here’s the fix. Assuming in your controller you have something like:

$this->;State->generateList();

and in the view:

echo form->input(state_id);

Simply modify the view to give:

echo form->input(state_id, array('empty' => '--'));

This will give you an entry up at the top that the user can select, which signifies empty with the text “–”. Change the text to anything you like and you’ll have the desired effect.

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In the spirit of rapid web development, I’ve stumbled upon jQuery. Here’s a testimonial from a jQuery user:

You start with 10 lines of jQuery that would have been 20 lines of tedious DOM JavaScript. By the time you are done it’s down to two or three lines and it couldn’t get any shorter unless it read your mind.”

In my experience it’s been more like five (5) lines of jQuery.

jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

I’ve found jQuery great for the following reasons:

• Simple Ajax in a breeze
• Search for elements in the DOM is made easy
• The helper function [ $() ] is a pleasure to use
• Most importantly: it handles cross browser compatibility.

Here We Go – Tutorials Galore

Your first step will be to Download jQuery 1.2.1 and include it in the head of your web page. After this you need to start reading some tutorials. Don’t worry, it’s going to take 15 minutes tops for you to start writing usable code:

• Visual jQuery – This is by far, my number one resource. It consolidates the API in a visual form, making easy to navigate.
• 15 Minutes of jQuery – Great for beginners
• jQuery for JavaScript programmers – Interesting tips on how to debug.
• Tutorials:How jQuery Works – Another beginner tutorial
• Tutorials:Getting Started with jQuery – Getting Started (for beginners)
• Tutorials:Live Examples of jQuery – This is what worked for me. Sometimes you just have to see it in action.

Why I Use jQuery

jQuery is fast, small, and easy to learn. It’s the core for many of the simpler Ajax I use in my web pages. Since I’m using CakePHP, there’s also Prototype, but that’s another story. I really don’t like having to learn a new language when I’m trying to do something simple. I don’t want to go delving into DOM and all that stuff just to dynamically add a class onto an element in the form. If I was a JavaScript programmer, it may not be a big deal for me. But, to me, there’s nothing worse than writing bad code to get something done, just because you don’t understand what’s going on. That’s why frameworks are what I live by.

Don’t wait, get started with jQuery today.

• JQuery, Prototype, and MooTools Benchmark – SlickSpeed
• A Bit On Open Source And Some Baz Background
• Ajax Activity Indicators
• See How Easily You Can Increase Page Load Time 10 Fold With jQuery
• To Suck or Not to Suck, That is Question for JavaScript

Straying From Convention

But sometimes, conventions suck. Sometimes you want greater control over things, but still don’t wanna do them from scratch. The strictness of the MVC structure dictates how your URLs will look. Consider this: CakePHP has a basic pages controller, which you can use when you don’t need a model or controller. You just enter the view and voilà , a page. But your pages have a URL of:

www.site.com/pages/page

Wouldn’t you rather:

www.site.com/page.htm

The Routes Configuration examples in the CakePHP manual are a bit simple. Here’s how to use a bit more advanced routing:

Router::connect('/(.*).htm', array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'display'));

This says, consider everything that comes in with an HTM extension and send the URL as a parameter to the display action on the pages controller.

The idea was stolen from Lumad CMS. They use the following in Rewrite in .htaccess for their pages:

RewriteRule ^~(.*) content_pages/displayurl/$1 [L]
They use a prefix of ‘~’ instead of a suffix of ‘.htm’, but you get the picture. I’m sorry to disappoint you, I’m not as creative as you thought.

How I Use Advanced Routing

I maintain a makeshift CMS using CakePHP. In this project I have a basic model (contents) with a title and body fields, among others. I would use the pages controller, but I need end users to be able to end pages through the database.

Router::connect('/(.*).htm', array('controller' => 'contents', 'action' => 'view'));

Conventions are great as long as they don’t get in the way. The great thing about CakePHP is that they frequently provide ways to get what you need done easily.

Make your static content look like static pages with Advanced routing.

Source: Routes Configuration [CakePHP Manual]

• CakePHP Bake – Baking Models, Controllers and Views the CakePHP 1.2 Way
• CakePHP Auth Component For Dummies Tutorial
• CakePHP Installation Guide: Just Add Water and 2 Medium Eggs
• Top 5 Basic SEO Tips – You Can Do These Yourself
• Enter CakePHP – Rapid Development Framework – No Really!

For the past three weekends, I’ve been away from my personal computer. The only life line I’ve had is my stock of Portable Apps on my 512MB USB disk. So I’ve been neglecting a few projects lately. But all of this has changed as of Friday. I’ve discovered XAMPP Lite. It’s just what it says it is, a Lite version of XAMPP. The beauty of this is that it can also run from a USB disk. There’s no install required. So partnered with XAMPP Lite, Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition, NotePad++ Portable, and, FileZilla Portable I can take my development on the road to anywhere I can stick in my USB disk.

Added Bonus

I don’t have to tell you that running an Apache web server, PHP 5.0 and MySQL from a USB disk is not a great idea for a production environment. Disk access to the USB disk is much slower than a hard drive. This has an unexpected benefit that I’ve noticed with CakePHP. Queries that used to take 3 milliseconds and 4 milliseconds now take 300 milliseconds and 400 milliseconds.

So why am I excited about stuff running so slowly? When you have a table with 20 fields, but only regularly use five (5), CakePHP makes it so easy write $this->paginate() or $this->findAll(); to retrieve results that we sometimes forget the all 20 fields are being returned every single time. You see the debug say that “3 queries took 10 ms“. You don’t really think much of it, but when the debug window says “3 queries took 500 ms“, you realize that you need to do some work. It makes you think about things that normalizing databases, and caching models, controllers, and views.

Installing XAMPP

There’s not really much to it. You download XAMMP Lite, dump it in a folder. That’s the first part. Now the configuration is where you have to be careful. There are two possible configurations:

1. Root Directory Installation
   • Drop the XAMPPlite folder to the root of the USB Disk.
   • Modify your Apache and PHP configuration files as you normally would.
2. Sub Directory Installation
   • Drop the XAMPPlite folder in a folder of your choice.
   • Run setup_xampp.bat. This will go through every configuration file and set the path based on the drive letter and installation directory. The problem with this installation is that you’ll have to do this every time you move to a system with a different drive setup (eg. At home my USB is G:, at work it’s F:)
   • Modify your Apache and PHP configuration files as you normally would.

Everything else you do is as normal. Happy developing. At 130 MB you can’t go wrong. At 130 MB a pop, you can’t go wrong.

Source: XAMPP 1.6.3a [Apache Friends]

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• Installing A LAMP Web Server System With Fedora Core 6

As you guys know, I’ve recently discovered the marvels of rapid web development with CakePHP. This shall be the first in a long serious of CakePHP related material coming from me since I’ve now veered off on a slightly different focus.

After a short analysis, I’ve picked CakePHP as my framework of choice. I’ve been struggling through it for a few months now, but it’s by far better than the alternative of coding by hand (Yeah, I know I’m lazy). I’ve struggled through it so that you don’t have to.

Downloading – Stable or Alpha Version

Step one is downloading CakePHP. The first problem that you’ll run into is that there are two (2) versions to pick from: Stable 1.1 and Alpha 1.2. When I first started out, I needed to use CakePHP for a project instantly, so I decided to with the stable version because the word alpha scared me a little bit. I mean, it’s not even beta yet.

That was my big mistake. A lot of seasoned CakePHP developers will tell you that the alpha version is ready to go and can (and has been) used in production environments. There is of course the slim chance that some key function or component might change slightly, and you application may break on an upgrade for the alpha version, but that’s a chance that I’m willing to take. The alpha version has a lot more in place (emailing templates, authentication, pagination of results, etc), that it just makes everything worthwhile. Also, a lot of the newer tutorials you’ll find make specific reference to version 1.2. And let’s face it, version 1.2 is just way cooler.

If you’re just starting out, I still recommend the alpha version 1.2, because by the time you become well versed and need to crank out a web application or site version 1.2 may well be stable.

Upload to Server

One of the key things I was looking for with a PHP framework is compatibility with PHP 4.0. Some of my clients are on older servers and it’s harder to get someone who is already paying for a host to switch just because you said so. Here are the server requirements from the CakePHP manual:

• An HTTP server (like Apache) with the following enabled: sessions, mod_rewrite (not absolutely necessary but preferred)
• PHP 4.3.2 or greater. Yes, CakePHP works great in either PHP 4 or 5.
• A database engine (right now, there is support for MySQL, PostgreSQL and a wrapper for ADODB).

The manual recommends various methods of installation for development purposes and production environments. These recommendations are all well and good if you have your own server, but some things are simply not configurable with the shared hosts that most of us use these days.

I personally don’t see a problem with the development setup. The take the CakePHP folder and dump it the the www root of the site (if it’s the main site of course) or a subdirectory. The one tweak I would make, if your host allows, is to point your www root for that domain to the app/webroot/ folder.

These are recommended for security purposes, but I haven’t seen a problem with any installation that I’ve had. As a matter of fact, this is one of the few times that I’ve heard someone recommend this type of setup. Even well established packages like WordPress, SMF, Zen Photo, phpBB, etc just need you to dump files in a folder.

There is something to be said about the recommended setup though. If you happen to run multiple installations of CakePHP and have different applications, in theory, all of them can share the same CakePHP base code and you’d have different application folders. But for right now, this is just a get up and get started guide. The only thing that you need to ensure is that the app/tmp directory and all subdirectories are writable.

Configuration

Everything you’ll need is in the app/config folder. The file core.php houses, well, core configuration settings. Here are a few of the main ones:

1. define('DEBUG', 3);

   set’s the debug level. Use 0 for production

2. define('CAKE_ADMIN', 'admin');

   You’re almost always going to need this, so you might as well uncomment it now. This sets up admin routing so you can have urls like site.com/admin/events/

3. define('CAKE_SESSION_STRING', 'DYhG93guVoUubWwiR2G0FgaC9mi');

   A random string used for CakePHP sessions. You need to change this into something unique or you might potentially leave holes in your app

Then we have the database.php file. Modify the following to suite your database configuration:

var $default = array(
'driver' => 'mysql',
'persistent' => false,
'host' => 'localhost',
'login' => 'username',
'password' => 'passowrd',
'database' => 'database name',
'prefix' => ''
);

I personally have a host that limits the number of MySQL databases that you’re allowed, so I’m forced to dump everything into one database. This makes the prefix option invaluable to me.

Lastly we have routes.php. This file is used to for URL routing. Consider the following:

Router::connect('/', array('controller' => 'contents', 'action' => 'view', 'home'));

This is going to route the homepage site.com/ to my contents controller and run the view action and pass to this the parameter home. This is the same as going to: site.com/contents/view/home/. We can also do some other marvelous things with routing, but I’ll save those for later.

Depending on what your setup is and where you host, you might have to make modifications to the .htaccess file. I haven’t narrowed down an explanation yet, but on various shared hosts, adding “RewriteBase /” solves a lot of problems, just keep that in mind.

Read more on the CakePHP manual.

Launch

Launch CakePHP and make sure your start up screen comes up. Then fire away are your Models, Views and Controllers.

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• Why My WordPress 2.7 Install “Failed”
• CakePHP Bake – Baking Models, Controllers and Views the CakePHP 1.2 Way

I has finally occurred to me that I should have gotten my own domain name a long time ago. Really, I don’t know what I was waiting for, but it was about time. Since my focus is Web 2.0, WebDevelopment2.com was an obvious choice. I’ve already written about moving wordpress to a different domain, so moving to this domain was walk in the park. I loaded up PhpMyAdmin and exported my database. Pulled up Notepad++ and did a search and replace for my old URL to the new one. Saved the file, zipped it back up, and uploaded it to the server. Since I usually deal with large databases, I didn’t even bother trying to load into PhpMyAdmin. Bigdump is now my favorite database importer for MySQL.

Finally, I loaded up the .htaccess file on the old domain name and slapped in a RewriteRule with a 301 redirect to WebDevelopment2.com. And Viola, here we have WordPress blog perfectly redirected, without losing a single inbound link. Sure, the Page Rank on the domain name is 0 (for now), but with a name like Web Development, it won’t be for long.

New Focus

I must admit, that when I started this blog I was only vaguely interested in web development and web design. My interests usually hop about like that. I started this blog when AJAX hit the scene. It was the next hottest thing and the birth of Web 2.0. However, coding AJAX, although not difficult, was tedious. And we all know, I don’t like tedium.

Lately, things have gotten a bit more serious, with respect to my interests in web development. But, I’m no less lazy. As a result, my focus (and hence the focus of this blog) is going to shift slightly. Many of you will not notice, but those of you who have been paying attention will see that something has changed. I’ve come to learn the beauty of web development frameworks, such as CakePHP for PHP (duh), Protoype and JQuery for Javascript and AJAX, and even Blueprint for CSS. Don’t worry, if you haven’t heard of any of these, you soon will. Being as lazy as I am, the DRY (Do not Repeat Yourself)Â principle naturally has you gravitating towards frameworks. If someone else; not just someone else, but an entire team of people, work on product for months and even years, I tend to think that they’ve done a better job than I ever code.

This is the new focus of my blog and I hope I don’t lose any of you guys and can bring greater quality and relevance to the things you read here.

• Moving WordPress To A Different Domain
• Your Choice of Web Development Framework Doesn’t Matter
• Comment Relish Plugin + High CPU Usage – Fixed The Right Way
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• Here’s a Quick Way to Use Multiple Local Roots With WAMP

Enter CakePHP

Here’s a bit of background. I know you’ve heard of Ruby on Rails (RoR). I mean who hasn’t? Well, I’m one of those guys who never paid it much mind, and for that I was wrong . RoR introduces the MVC model: Model-View-Controller pattern. What these Frameworks do is bring this pattern to the PHP platform and I love them for it.

CakePHP is a bit simpler than Code Igniter at first, so that’s what drew me to it. However, this weekend I stumbled upon the Baking capability of CakePHP and I was hooked. I have an upcoming project, which I’ve decided to use CakePHP on. I will keep you posted on how things go.

This is what helped me make my decision: CodeIgniter vs. CakePHP

Good Luck to you guys.

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