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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

As webservices grow so does the need for being able to communicate with them in an easy fashion. This simple blog alone uses 2 webservices. The recent tracks at the bottom is a feed I pull from Last.fm and my spam protection is provided by Akismet. When first building my site I looked for an already built solution and found a partial solution in Felix Geisendörfer’s WebModel.

I was recently asked to join the development team at CakePHP a position I graciously and excitedly accepted. And although I’m still a bit wet behind the ears, I thought I would share some of my experiences in how you can get involved with Open Source Software.