Writing

At some point or another we’ve all had to make a data model that involved various flags to indicate different statuses / modes for an object. Often the schema for such a data model may end up looking like

With the help of Oscar Carlsson I’ve updated the AcoSync Shell and renamed it to the AclExtrasShell. With Oscar’s help we’ve added quick and easy ways to recover and verify your tree structures. AclExtras Shell also incorporates all the existing functionality of AcoSync Shell.

So 1.2 is nearly complete, the code is frozen and there are only a few bugs left to squash before the final release is ready. So you want to upgrade your application from 1.1 to 1.2. Although the 1.2 moniker suggests a ‘minor’ version, a lot has changed under the hood and entire API’s have been rebuilt.

Eclipse is widely popular, robust and powerful IDE. It supports PHP through the PDT project . PDT gives you some good PHP related development tools, including code completion & code templates to help you save some time.

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.

The folks at Packt Publishing were kind enough to send me a copy of their newly published book CakePHP Application Development to review. The book is authored by Ahsanul Bari and Anupom Syam, and is a quick read at 300 pages.

I like many webdevelopers build a lot of forms. Forms are the bread and butter of web applications, and while making forms is getting easier for developers, users often still have a hard time with them. In these circumstances it is necessary to give them a help above and beyond ‘password’.

Creating gracefully degrading Javascript and CSS is pretty simple these days. I’m sure this has been written about a million times over as well. However, I thought it would be worthwhile to share how I do it as well. Mainly, because in addition to AJAX and effects I use Javascript as a way of enabling different CSS selectors for elements.

Lately you may (but hopefully did not) have noticed this site being unavailable for long periods of time. It seems my hosting company has had quite the bit of trouble with the hardware running the VPS my account is hosted on.

However, they are working on it and hopefully it becomes a thing of the past.

By now you’ve got an awesome Acl and Auth controlled app running. However, making navigation menus is a pain with dynamic, and variable permissions. Outside of making menu elements for each type of Aro and including them in your layout, there currently aren’t many options (at least none that I’m aware of). I was faced with this exact problem a while back, and couldn’t find a suitable solution, so I made one.

As I post more and more code here, I’m finding it tedious to update all the various .zip files of code as I make changes. So I’ve taken a page from Tim and Felix and made an account at gitHub. This makes it easy for me and you to find the newest revision of whatever you may be looking for.

In my previous Auth and Acl tutorial I mentioned that I wasn’t including a way for users ARO to be automatically updated when a User’s group was updated. Well ‘hepper’ posted a patch to the AclBehavior in the comments to that article.

The documentation for CakePHP has grown in leaps and bounds since the creation of the cookbook. Today I wanted to look at a few methods and conventions that may not be crystal clear from reading the book or api.

Object::_set().

Object is the parent class for almost all other classes in CakePHP.

So instead of an article this time around I’ve done some housekeeping and updated the geshi helper to a newer version that includes the ‘show plain code’ links and I’ve provided a sample of the javascript I use to do the effect. Furthermore, I’ve updated the licensing on it to be harmonious with the rest of the code found on this site.

With all the talk of testing going on, I thought it would be good to look at how tests work and what is makes them tick. SimpleTest handles the bulk of test case execution, however, there are a few CakePHP specifics that are not part of a normal SimpleTest::UnitTestCase.

When bakers first start using CakePHP there is a tendency to use requestAction() more often than it should be. Often requestAction() gets used to pull in common elements like recent posts or new comments, or to make menus. This makes sense in a way as it keeps the comments code in the CommentsController and all is well.

Often on IRC and the CakePHP google group, I hear people asking how to get values out of the Session or how to find out what is currently in the Session. Generally this is connected to AuthComponent, which is can be complicated component. However, some simple ‘crude’ PHP tactics can make the “whats’s in my session?” question very simple.

Continuing in my previous vein of ACL related topics. I’ve got another handy addition to the ACL user’s toolbox.

Websites need maintenance, and sometimes that maintenance requires the site to go down for a little bit as you tweak the database, add additional capacity or make large changes to the application code. In these circumstances you cannot afford to have users mucking about on your application. However, you might need access to ensure all your amazing upgrades go smoothly or perhaps do the upgrading inside the application itself.

I’ve been working on a project that collects various surveys and stores the data very much like below.

While this is a data structure is very normalized and provides a flexible base to build various surveys with. What it does not provide is an easy interface for building reports.