Now if you’re into Web 2.0 and haven’t heard of the Lightbox script, then you must be living under a rock. If this is your first time crawling out from under that rock, you can get a quick sample of the Lightbox effect here. Just click on the first picture and watch the magic.

The Lightbox effect is used to pop up a larger image into the forefront of a web page. You start out with a link, usually a thumbnail of the large image. When the user clicks, the large image pops out and the rest of the web page is faded out.

The original Lightbox script uses the Prototype/script.aculo.us combo, so some may complain that it’s a bit code heavy. I would tend to agree, since I’m a fan of jQuery however, since CakePHP still uses Prototpye/script.aculo.us for their AJAX functionality, I’m not ready to jump ship just yet.

For those who are, here’s a light of the the Lightbox imitations.

There’s one called Thickbox, and another version (Slightly thickerbox), which use jQuery, however, it doesn’t have the same feel as the original Lightbox script that I’ve gotten used to.

Merry Christmas and Happy Scripting!

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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!

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Poll results for What Do You Look for in a PHP Framework are in:

Most of you prefer a framework that is Quick and Easy. Hey, I’m totally with you guys on that. When deciding on a web development framework, it has to be easy. It’s no fun if it takes hours to learn and saves you minutes. For me, CakePHP definitely fits this bill. The bake routines save me so much time during initial development.

Next on the list was a Less Code Needed and a Small Learning Curve. Again, that would definitely fit high on my list. I’m sorry, I’m just lazy that way.

That last result on the list is interesting, but expected. Not many people needed the framework to have a Small Footprint. With the type of processing that is required nowadays, sometimes the lite/light version doesn’t cut it. With that said, we also have a lot more processing power to push those heavy frameworks along. In my opinion, it’s less important that a back end framework be light as apposed to a JavaScript framework. The back end is handled strictly by the server, so the user doesn’t take the hit. With a JavaScript framework the user needs to download the entire thing. In this day and age it has become more cost effective to through some more CPU at the problem while saving weeks (or even months) in development time.

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By now you’ve all either heard or experienced first hand the blow dealt to the Page Rank of many websites by the mighty hand of Google. They are basically targeting any websites that serve links, which are not natural. This generally includes any links that have been sold on the website.

PayPerPost is one of the largest companies out there that pay bloggers to post about different things. They are generally instructed to keep their reviews relevant to their content, but sometimes bloggers stray a bit. Of course Google has made these blogs a prime target for the Page Rank drop.

The irony is that PayPerPost uses (used) the Google Page Rank as a way to quality a blog. Now that damn near all PayPerPost blogs are hit by Page Rank drop (with a lot of them dropping out right to 0). They’re going to implement their own method of blog ranking:

PayPerPost’s CEO, Ted Murphy, quickly came up with a solution — since PR is obsolete and no longer represents accurate data for both publishers and advertisers, they are going to develop their own trademark rank, called “RealRank”, based on:

• 70% - visitors per day

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Now i doubt it has crossed anyone's mind to use CakePHP to create a custom content management system (CMS). Even though you're not designing a full blown CMS, sometimes it's nice to give novice users a way to create HTML content for a website or web application. The simplest way to do this is to integrate a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor.

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.

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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.

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Here's the kindergarten version of a 3 Column CSS layout that you're going to get from most other websites:

Simple enough right? The alignment is done in your style sheet, where the left would float left, the center would also float left and the right would float right.

You could set all your styles based on these column ids. Whether it's background images or just background colors, the sky's the limit here. But here's the kicker: your column heights are all dependent on how much text you have in each div. Leaving you with a messy, uneven mess.

Wrap It Up Before Messing With CSS

There's the easy way and there's the hard way, which a lot of people mistake for the right way. If you're looking for the hard way, then you need to look somewhere else. Try Googling "3 column css hack ie ns, oh crap this doesn't look right, wtf". That should lead to to the pain that you searching for.

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The Problem

I've had this problem for a while, but it's become more of a problem since I started working heavily with CakePHP.

Here is my WAMP folder structure: D:\wamp\www\cake\[various app]

Under this folder, I would have baked all the different applications that I'm working on at the time (app1, app2, app3, etc). So I could have my DocumentRoot set to my cake folder and access the different apps in my browser by:

• http://localhost/app1/
• http://localhost/app2/
• http://localhost/app3/

That's a perfectly fine idea, except that 95% of the time, when I deploy an application for a client it's going to be installed on their root directory of that domain name. Even on my server, all my applications (CakePHP and otherwise) have their own domain or sub domain.

If we keep everything to relative paths and stress using CakePHP's $html->url() function, then everything should be fine. But sometimes I'm lazy and I want to do a quick href=/ and not have to try to figure out how many levels I've gone. Also, I want to confidence to upload my entire folder to the clients server and only have to change database configurations.

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