I recently had to do some maintenance work on an old application hosted on the CakePHP server. The CakePHP project has 20 or so sites and applications deployed in dokku. Dokku allows us to build a platform-as-a-service for our sites that operates on a single server. Dokku encourages using heroku-style ‘buildpacks’ to deploy applications.

I wanted to share a new CakePHP plugin that provides feature flagging. In a Saas environment, I’ve been a long time advocate for using feature flags to release changes instead of deploys. Feature flags let you better manage release risk by allowing you deliver code with new features disabled.

During the development of CakePHP, we also wanted to update migrations to be compatible. However, we had stumbled into a tedious dependency graph. Currently phinx relies on cakephp/database. While cakephp/migrations depends on phinx. In order to do a major release on cakephp/migrations (to provide CakePHP 5.

As I use webcomponents more, I found myself wanting a way to define the HTML for webcomponents with a non-trivial amount of light DOM contents in a more reusable programatic way. So far, I’ve found that modelling webcomponents as template fragments is a reasonably ergonomic solution. It enables usage such as:

When re-building docket with htmx, I wanted to retain the confirm dialog experience I had with react. Instead of taking on a dependency for this, I chose to build my own combining HTMX and Webcomponents. The resulting UX feels snappy and similar to a client rendered experience. My end result looks like this:

I wanted to share a CSS and webcomponent layout that I’ve been pretty happy with in a few projects. With webcomponents now widely supported, I was able to remove one of the last bit of inline scripts I had left in docket converting it to a webcomponent. The layout offers a layout with a 250px sidebar and content area.

After updating docket to use htmx, I wanted to share my experience. First and most important, HTMX is more than just a client side framework. Instead of using a JavaScript library to render your application in the browser, you have incrementally load HTML as your application’s state changes.

Webcomponents are starting to get more traction now that they are fully supported across browsers. I have recently been rebuilding my personal todo list software Docket with HTMX and Webcomponents.