Well today I took the time to upgrade to CakePHP 1.2 RC1 in the spirit of ‘eating your own dogfood’. I got the usual warnings about vendor() being deprecated. I also took the time to switch over all my Bindable calls to the fresh core Containable Behavior. Which for the most part consisted of changing restrict() calls to contain() calls.
Earlier today a CakePHP 1.2 RC1 was released. You can read the full changelog
or read the official announcement to learn about whats been going on since the beta. Also download a new Cake and smell the fresh icing.
Earlier this week I learned that isset() behaves a little differently than I had expected when dealing with arrays. Now I already knew that isset() would return false on a variable not existing, or being set to null. However, I was not expecting it to return false on an array key existing and being set to null.
I was recently asked to join the development team at CakePHP a position I graciously and excitedly accepted. And although I’m still a bit wet behind the ears, I thought I would share some of my experiences in how you can get involved with Open Source Software.
Indicating to the user which fields are required is something that increases usuability, helping the user fill out the form more effectively and efficiently. These visual cues have absolutely nothing to do with the structure of the document, and would best be handled by CSS.
All versions of Internet Explorer from 5.5 forward support CSS expressions. If you are not familiar with CSS expressions in IE, they are a powerful and non-standard way commonly used to plug the gaping and vast holes in IE’s CSS support.
Super fresh in the SVN builds of CakePHP 1.2 is the new code coverage analysis. If you are living on the bleeding edge of cake development or just want a preview of the neat things to come once 1.2 is complete read on.
The guys at debuggable have contributed a fantastic tool to the testing suite for CakePHP 1.2.
CakePHP 1.2 is a fantastic improvement over 1.1. However like many, my work has a stable release only policy. So I’m stuck using 1.1 at work for the time being. But after drinking the 1.2 juice, 1.1 is missing some of the potent automagic flavours. First up editing multiple rows in models. The stock syntax is lacking in that it doesn’t support this at all.
I’ve been a bit out of the loop due to the awesome weather we’ve been having in toronto as of late. I’ve just read through Jonathan Snook’s article about CSS resets and how he doesn’t use them and while I can totally understand his position and how he is okay with browser variances and typographic quirks.
Continuing with the trend of CakePHP information here, I’m going to cover some of the acronyms and lexicon of CakePHP. I hang out a lot on #cakephp and there are repeating trends in some of the questions that get asked so hopefully I can answer some of those questions here. As well as provide a bit of my personal experiences.
Routing in CakePHP is quite flexible in how you can route your urls to your controllers and actions. Offering both variable replacement and regex routing. You can route almost any parameter that is set by dispatcher and more. So lets try a few of these.
GeSHi or the Generic Syntax Highlighter is a simple yet powerful syntax highlighter for many languages. Implemented in many CMS. When I wanted syntax highlighting for my postings I decided to implement GeSHi. I wanted to share my implementation of GeSHi as a CakePHP helper.
Making RSS feeds and alternative content types other than HTML opens a lot of options in how your content can be used, displayed and combined. In prior version of cakePHP webservices were indicated by prefixing a url with the desired content type so an xml version of a blog index might look like xml/posts/index.
Well the redesign and rebuild is complete. I’ve gutted my site and rebuilt it from the ground up. There are more changes than just a shiny new design though. With this redesign I’m shifting the focus of the site around a bit as well.
Well Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone. I’ve been busy as always and have put up a new character painting in the Digital Section. This is the first painting that I’ve done in Photoshop that is approaching the quality and feel of my oil work. As time is always at a premium these days, I will probably be doing a few more digital paintings. They are easier and less fussy to work on than oils.
These updates keep getting farther and farther apart however, this time I have a good excuse. I got married! On Aug 25th of this year I got married to a lovely woman named Tina. We met in college and have been inseparable since. So that is my excuse, I never realized how much work went into a wedding. Insane. I designed the invitations the thank you cards, and did calligraphy on all the name cards.
Well I finally finished a few things that I’ve been working on. I’ve added a couple more shirts to the clothing portfolio. I’m really happy with them, and they’ll be available on my store as soon as I get it complete. It is coming along well, and I plan on getting it done soon. Furthermore, I have more shirts and paintings in the works for your viewing pleasure.
Wow, it has been one heck of a long time since I’ve posted anything let alone new work. I have been working on a number of things including learning much more about programming in PHP and mySQL. I’ve also been doing a bit of sketching and drawing but haven’t had the chance to really get my paints out.
New work! Check the portfolio for a new painting called “the man with the hollow heart”. I tried a new surface with this piece, and think it came out quite well. Since my old cart system was not working at all, I am working on deploying Zen cart and hope to have it configured soon. There will even be goodies to buy as well.
Well it has been a while since I last did anything here. But I have been busy in the last month, and have things to show and share. First is a new painting in the gallery. It is the largest painting I’ve done yet. The triptych measures 20“x52” which is quite large for someone like me who doesn’t normally work larger than 11“x14”.