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.
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.
I recently came across this video on Youtube and while the author makes some convincing arguments for using bitfields. I’d like to share my experiences having worked with them in a few applications. A long time ago, I also thought that bitfields were neat.
A few months back I upgraded docket and this site to CakePHP 4.5 from an earlier 4.x release. I wanted to share my notes from the upgrade process so that if you’re considering an upgrade you have a better idea of what to expect.
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.
I have been following the Webauthn standards and browser support since the early days of FIDO compatible keys. I strongly believe that hardware keys are our best path forward to provide phishing resistant, easy to operate authentication, that doesn’t compromise on privacy.
I recently decided to go down a rabbit hole of wanting to learn a new client side library. I was interested in learning more about libraries that aimed to have a minimal footprint even at the cost of providing a more modest API. For this site I have simple requirements, and I wanted to see how simple the ‘simple’ abstractions are these days.
Modern PHP development generally means using a suite of tools to perform code formatting and static analysis. For a long time, I have been using composer to install theses developement tools. While using composer works great, when you’re working on multiple projects it results in duplicate copies of frequently used tools.
A few weeks back I came across a site that can generate all of your GitHub activity into a single chart. Looking at mine, I noticed that I have been fairly consistent in my activity over the past 15 years.
Each year I try to learn a new language, framework or technology. This practice encourages me to continuously learn new skills and be a newbie again. This year, I’ve spent the past few months working on a mobile client for Docket . While the mobile web UI works well enough, I wanted to see if the UX could be smoother with a native application.
During my workshop at Cakefest 2022 I covered the new content-type negotiation features shipped in CakePHP 4.4. I wanted to share that information here so it is more easily found in the future.
CakePHP 4.4.0RC1 was released recently and I wanted to go over the new error subsystem that is being added for 4.4. I haven’t ever really loved the interface that CakePHP provided for error and exception handling.
In 2021, I designed and built a custom split keyboard . I quite enjoy that keyboard, and it has been my daily driver for the past eight months. After completing the hand wired board, I wanted to learn more about electronics, and keyboards. The natural next step to me was to learn how to take my custom layout to the next level of completion.
CakePHP 4.3 was recently released, and it contains a greatly improved way to build CASE expressions. CASE expressions are great when you want to do conditional aggregation or add computed fields to results. Lets say you wanted to create SQL that mapped integer values to string names, you could use SQL that looks like: