I’ve been working on content for my CakeFest workshop this year, and thought it would be interesting to see a commonly used authorization pattern implemented as an extension to CakePHP’s authorization system. The pattern I wanted to implement was ‘sudo mode’. Often this pattern is used in applications that have longer session duration.

In the next major release of CakePHP we’re going to be removing the AuthComponent. This component and its helpers have been part of CakePHP since the 1.2 days, but their time has come to an end. Over the years, AuthComponent has become a complex and difficult to extend piece of CakePHP. In its wake, we’re promoting two new plugins.

Earlier today, I packaged up AssetCompress 0.17. This release has a few noteworthy features.

A few weeks back during CakeFest 2014, I had the opportunity to hunker down and get DebugKit upgraded to CakePHP 3.0. While it was less of an upgrade and more of a re-design and re-write, I think the end results justify the drastic approach I took. First, a few of the problems I was trying to solve in the new version:

1. It is hard to make DebugKit look great as it lives on the same page as your app.

Making sure your freshly released CakePHP plugin still passes all of its tests can be a bit of a time sink. Setting up Jenkins for small project can be a big job. After I setup Jenkins once or twice, I personally longed for a simple way to get continuous integration with not much work.

In a previous post I talked about switching to Vim and how I was using Janus to get a good foundational set of plugins to work with, and make starting with vim less daunting. As I’ve gotten more comfortable with vim, I wanted a simpler way to manage my vim config.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Over the long Ontario weekend, I took some time to update Acl Extras. It now works with plugins and the improvements made to the Auth + Acl for 1.3. The master branch contains the CakePHP 1.3 compatible version. While the 1.0.0 tag, and 1.0 branch are still compatible with CakePHP 1.2.

Earlier today I tagged and packaged up the 1.2 release of DebugKit. DebugKit 1.2 features a number of improvements and features over 1.1 which include:

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 marks the 1.1 release of DebugKit. After using it for the past few weeks and not finding any new issues or getting and new tickets. A few new features snuck into the release, courtesy of Andy Dawson.

Hopefully by now you’ve used DebugKit , and found it to be as useful as I do. If you’ve ever wanted to add a new panel, you can and its actually quite easy to do.

Generating code coverage for test cases is a handy feature, it gives you a quick and easy way to determine how much of your code is running during your tests. It doesn’t ensure that the tests are good or that you have enough assertions, but code that doesn’t run definitely has not been tested. Before code coverage was created it was very difficult to determine how much code was being run.

So I’ve been working away on DebugKit the last few weeks. And I think its at a level where I can suggest other people give it a whirl. Its not at a stable release point. But if you are feeling adventurous and don’t mind using beta code give it a try. There are a few notable features have been added, so in no particular order here they are.

As most people know TextMate is a pretty amazing text editor, probably one of the best for MacOS. What you may not know is that CakePHP has its own textmate bundle. this bundle is maintained by Joël Perras who is also a recent addition to the CakePHP core team.

This is a quick trick I learned from master baker gwoo. If by chance you have multiple projects, and those projects share multiple plugins. You are in a bit of a pickle.