For 3.0 the team and I are re-visiting how we’ll recommend installing CakePHP, and as always I wanted to try to provide context on what my thoughts are, and get some feedback on the plans.
Background & context
CakePHP is currently availiable in a few different ways. Generally people either download zip files, or clone the repository. Both of these methods provide a quick easy way to get started.
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.
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.
Its been a few weeks of working in the evenings but its pretty much done. I’ve been wanting to do this redesign for a while now. 2 years ago when I built the version of this domain you’ve all come to know, I attempted to create a design that was different from other programming blogs, and fused my interests in both design and programming. I feel it turned out well.
Last night I updated this site to run on the latest 1.3 build. While I know I should have done it earlier, I simply haven’t had the time. And since I went through it, I figured I could document it and share what the upgrade process is like for a small site, that doesn’t see a ton of maintenance action like this one.
Everyone can breath a sign of relief. Late last night there were rumours that CakePHP had died. Confusion and disbelief spread pretty quickly through twitter, and IRC. However, CakePHP is doing great, and is very far from dead.
If you’ve been following the ongoing development of the 1.3 branch over at code.cakephp.org:http://code.cakephp.org. You may have noticed that bake has had a significant overhaul, and a number of features and enhancements have been built in.
What started out small has grown into an ugly tangled monster. As with many people’s github accounts, mine only had a few things in it at first and all was well. But as more code was written the repository began to smell and was in need of some splitting up. So that is what has been done.
Today is the one year anniversary of my first commit to CakePHP, amazing how time flies. It seems not too long ago that gwoo and nate approached me to join the core team and help with writing the tests for 1.2. What started with test cases soon bloomed into full blown commit access and had me working on all parts of the core. Year one also saw the creation of DebugKit which is nearing its 1.
Well its been a while coming but today, DebugKit officially left GitHub. As noted in the past by some, the CakePHP family of projects were a bit scattered. So in an effort to consolidate everything, DebugKit has moved over to thechaw alongside other fabulous CakePHP projects like CakeBook and ApiGenerator.
If you’ve been to the http://api.cakephp.org today you may have noticed a few changes. First its no longer powered by doxygen. Doxygen has been giving us a few headaches in the last few months. So gwoo and myself have taken it upon ourselves to write our own Api generation tool. We called it ApiGenerator you can see it running at api.cakephp.org.
Well another year has begun, and often this is the time that people mull over the past and make plans for the future. Well this post will be no different.
Looking to the past
Personally, my wife and I decided that it was high time we abandon the renter’s life and make a concerted effort to tighten the belts and try to purchase a place. We did so in september, and I’ve never been happier.
Earlier this evening the last 300 changes to CakePHP were merged into the trunk forming CakePHP RC4. It should be a painless update for all, and it brings us one step closer to a final stable release of 1.2, something we all look forward to.
I’ve been working hard over the last few weeks to improve the DebugKit and have added what I think are some pretty cool features. First up is FireCake. FireCake is a fully functional FirePHP library built specifically with CakePHP in mind.
I’ve uploaded the slides from the talks I gave at CakeFest Argentina. Both unit test talks are one file, as that is how it was originally written. You can find them in my Downloads area. Hope you enjoy.
Well I’m finally back in Canada after a somewhat hairy experience at JFK airport in New York, I’m home in the great white north. I had an awesome time at CakeFest and would like to thank all the sponsors and all the people who came out. It was a really great experience for me, and a pleasure to finally be able to put faces to the names and lines of text/code speak to / read each day.
Cakefest 2 Argentina is quickly approaching. If you are sitting on the fence on going until the last minute then get off and come on down. Its going to be a good time with lots of great talks. I’ll even be there! I’m giving two talks one on Unit Testing and the other on plugin development. Hope to see you there.
To find out more about Cakefest follow the link.
I’ve had quite the busy last little month or two. My wife and I have been house shopping for a while, and found a place about 2 months ago. However, just last weekend we moved into our new (to us at least) condo in west Toronto.
The new sideproject is the CakePHP DebugKit . I’ve been hard at work building a ‘debug toolbar’ for CakePHP.
If you are following the development of CakePHP today is a good day for you. RC3 was released today! We have all been working really hard to make this Release Candidate better than the last one. There have been over 400 commits since the last RC2. Some of the big changes are related to performance. Larry Masters and the rest of the team have been hard at work making CakePHP snappier and all around speedier.