One of the new features in CakePHP 2.1 I am excited about are view blocks and view inheritance. Both are concepts borrowed from Jinja2 and other templating systems. Template inheritance allows you to create skeleton views, and define blocks to populate that skeleton in a child template.

CakePHP uses salted sha1 hashes for passwords by default, and has for a while. There has been some talk on the mailing list lately of switching the default hashing to something more secure, such as bcrypt. I think this is a great idea, and will find its way into CakePHP in a future release. Providing a reasonanle upgrade experience is the biggest problem to solve, if the default hashing strategy was to change.

In case you were not able to attend CakeFest 2011. I’ve posted my slides up on slideshare. The event was a great success. Thanks to Graham for organizing the event and to all the attendees. Its great to meet the community and put faces and names to irc handles and mailing list email addresses.

This week I’ve been participating in the SQLServer Jump-in Camp. My focus for the workshops have been building out better support for IIS and SQL Server in CakePHP. As I generally develop on MacOS, I do development for other platforms through virtual machines. This has worked well with linux servers in the past.

I’ve recently been working a fair bit on the new documentation for CakePHP and while sphinx is amazing, it doesn’t come with a built-in domain for generating PHP documentation.

In a previous article I covered how CakePHP would potentially be moving to using sphinx for the 2.0 documentation. Myself and some of the other CakePHP developers have been working on this option, and seeing if it has any legs. Turns out that sphinx is actually a pretty great tool.

Today, I tagged the 0.3 release for my AssetCompress plugin. A few new features have been added, and several issues resolved. You can get the code from github

Build tool

The AssetCompress shell is now able to generate all the build files that are named in your project. This is great for integration with build/deployment scripts.

In the release announcement for 1.3.7, it was tentatively announced that CakePHP would be moving its documentation over to ReST, Git and sphinx. Having documentation in a git repo, and using sphinx to generate documentation has a few nice wins, that would be difficult to achieve with the current book application.

This time last year, amid rumours that the end of CakePHP was nigh, CakePHP died and rose from the dead . The year that followed those events, has been a very exciting one. CakePHP continues to be a thriving project with huge popularity, and a growing community. This year has a number of milestones as well.

Previously I wrote about the changes that have been done for the request handling in CakePHP 2.0. Response handling is another subsystem that has received a significant facelift. As with request information and functionality, response related features were spread across several objects. Controller, RequestHandler and Dispatcher all had a slice of the pie.

Work on CakePHP 2.0 is moving along, and I wanted to take some time to discuss and explain one of the sizeable refactorings that has been done for 2.0. In previous versions request parameters were just a bunch of arrays that were copied to the various places they were needed in the framework.

Over the weekend I put some time into my AssetCompress plugin. A few remaining issues were fixed and a few new features have been added since the previous release.

As you may or may not know CakePHP is transitioning to PHPUnit and with this transition comes a totally new Mock object interface/implementation.

In the past I’ve used a variety of tools to deploy client sites, most often using version control. However, for my blog I’ve always used FTP. Its a pretty old-school approach, and something that I’ve been lacking the time to correct. Last weekend I finally took the plunge and figured out how to get Capistrano to deploy my site.

In the recent bakery article concerning the ongoing development of CakePHP 2.0. The already underway migration from SimpleTest to PHPUnit was introduced. I wanted to go into some of the reasons and motivations for that decision as well as explain some of the long term benefits.

Normally when people think of the App class, they think of a file loader. However, App is also able to introspect your application and provide information about the resources it contains.

NoSQL datasources are becoming a bigger part of our everyday life as web developers. If you haven’t heard about it before, MongoDB is a SQL free database built in C++.

I’ve just released another plugin for CakePHP. This one helps reduce the number of HTTP requests made by helping you concatenate and compress your asset files. I’ve been working on it on and off for about 3 months now, and am pretty happy with where it is. It includes both server side and client side libraries for loading compressed files.