CakePHP

First Glimpse

Yes, it is a very pretty website.  Sure, you could put together a blog in about 5 minutes.   But now you’ve committed to start using this framework called CakePHP and all bets are off.  The tutorials are not complete.  The code doesn’t always work as expected.   The documentation available on the web is sketchy at best, and professional books on the subject are out of date and

Useful Stuff

Following in the footsteps of all modern web platforms, they have rolled their own Model View Controller (MVC) and it looks a lot like what I’ve seen with Joomla and Drupal.  The docs say this is were thing go –

  1. Model – All the important stuff including database access.  After all, it IS the model – a live simulation of the application.
  2. View – Take that model stuff and put it into the appropriate format.
  3. Controller – act as the traffic cop by allowing certain types of actions on the model in question.

What makes it fun:  CRUD [ Create, Read, Update and Delete] in a few minutes.  Scaffolding, roll your own backoffice in seconds by declaring One-to-many/many to one relationships to match your database.

Silly Conventions – Naming Schemes

Module Case Filename Sample
Database Plural Posts
Controller PLural /app/Controller/PostsController.php PostsController
Model Singular /app/Model/Post.php Post
View Plural /app/View/Posts/add add.ctp