If you’re interested in CakePHP, you may like to check out CakePHP Application Development by Packt Publishing. This book covers lots of beginner topics such as installation and configuration. It is a good book to get started on CakePHP, it has a step-by-step guide that can be useful for starters. The book targets CakePHP 1.2 however, the book is written before CakePHP 1.2 is released so it does not have updated screenshots in it.

Generally the book’s concept is correct. The explanations are written as if someone is talking to you. If you do not like that style of learning, best you avoid this title. CakePHP Application Development covers a creation of a sample app — Quickwall — at the end of the book. Unlike typical tutorials that teaches you how to create a blog with XX framework, this goes into more depth on how best to use the inbuilt features of CakePHP.

My major grip on this book is its numerous errors in code, and a couple of quite unforgiving ones too. The books could have been better edited. Some of the codes did not appear to run and you have to look around to check for syntax errors. It isn’t often, still it’s a bad impression. The codes in the book are badly indented too. This makes the codes hard to read. It’s a good book to learn, but can be better.

Find out more about CakePHP Application Development here, you can also have a look at the book’s Table of Contents here.

On the brighter note, when I working in Windows I actually realized how much I missed Windows Explorer. It’s probably the single most useful utility I miss when I switch to a MacBook.

Perhaps it’s time to update the CakePHP requirements and be indicative of the lack of support for PHP 5.3.

Now the library is throwing deprecated notices all around “Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in…”. Also there is a PHP warning:

To stop the deprecated notices, I had to modify Cake’s core, not something I like to do.

I added the line “error_reporting (E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED);” at the top of /cake/libs/object.php. I also updated /cake/libs/configure.php by changing “error_reporting(E_ALL);” to “error_reporting (E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED);”.

This doesn’t solve the problem exactly, it just suppresses the deprecation notices so I can continue working. For a PHP 5.3 compatible CakePHP, you’ll need to use CakePHP 1.3 which currently isn’t stable. I’ll definitely be trying it soon but in the meantime I’ll just have to suppress error reporting.

Update: jdbartlett commented on a better way:

If you’re not doing any debugging, you can add the above code to the top of /app/webroot/index.php and suppress the error messages without editing the core.

Thanks jdbartlett! You saved me time.

The NetBeans team is pleased to announce the availability of NetBeans IDE 6.7 Milestone 3 (M3).

Highlights of the release include: 

• Project Kenai Integration
  - Create Kenai projects from within the NetBeans IDE
  - Locate and open sources for Kenai projects in the IDE
  - Full integration with Bugzilla
• Maven
  - Multi-tabbed artifact details viewer available
  - Graphical view of transitive dependencies available
• PHP
  - Code coverage and Selenium support
• Platform
  - Enhancements to Output WIndow, Update Center catalog and Search performance
• Profiler
  - Export profiling data into CSV, HTML and XML file formats
• C/C++
  - Easy host setup for remote development
• GlassFish Integration
  - Derby support registers Derby associated with v3 Prelude instance
• Integration with the Hudson Continuous Integration server

Read the complete list of NetBeans IDE 6.7 Milestone 3 features and enhancements. 

0. Objective

To run XAMPP’s PHP CLI, you first have to set up the environment variables for PHP CLI. Also introduce how to get started on CakePHP’s console.

1. Setting up environment variables

Firstly, we would need to let the command prompt know where to find php.exe. In my computer set up, it is located in ‘C:\xampp\php\’. Yours might be in ‘C:\xampp-lite\php\’ depending on where you install your XAMPP.

We need to edit some system environment variables:

Click on ‘Edit the system environment variables’, a dialog box will pop up. Click on ‘Environment Variables…’, you should be greeted with the following dialog box:

My path looks like this before I add anything:

Append your XAMPP PHP directory at the back of what is already there:

Open a new command prompt (don’t use existing one), and type “php” and see if there are any problems.

2. Avoiding MSVCR71.dll error

I encountered an error: “php.exe – System Error: The program can’t start because MSVCR71.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.”.

PHP MSVCR71 dll error

This error is caused by the “php_pgsql.dll” extension. We can proceed by disabling PostgreSQL if we don’t use it. If you do need it, you may consider installing Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1.

Open the file ‘php.ini’ in ‘C:\xampp\php\’ and search for “pgsql”. Disable the extension by placing a semicolon in the beginning of the line this way:

3. Command Prompt’s “Start in” setting

You can have multiple shortcuts of command prompts in your desktop. I set my command prompt shortcut to start in ‘C:\xampp\htdocs\dev\app’ which is my CakePHP application folder:

Command prompt properties start in setting

And when I run the command prompt, it will show:

This is just more convenient without having to navigate through the folders again and again.

4. Running the CakePHP console

You should run the Cake console in your application folder this way:

This runs the ‘cake’ program and tells it to bake.

For a list of CakePHP console commands to use, you can try:

That’s all

You can also put the CakePHP console path in your Windows environment variables. However note that if you have multiple projects with different versions, this method is less than ideal. Hope it helps.

Here’s how to ignore files and folders using Git. You can create a file “.gitignore” and place in the files and folders that you wish to ignore (separated with a line break).

In the file: “./.gitignore”

Here’s a list of standard things to do a .gitignore. It ignores the thumbnail files generated by Mac OSX and Windows. (I’m on Windows Vista.) You can place this on the top folder of your Git project:

“nbproject” is for NetBeans.

In the file: “./app/.gitignore”

Well, if you use CakePHP, you may want to add an additional .gitignore file in your CakePHP app directory:

I am open to suggestions what other files or folders are good to ignore but these are all I can recall. You can read more about gitignore at kernal.org.

Django 1.0 alpha released!

In accordance with the Django 1.0 release roadmap, tonight we’ve released the first “alpha” testing version of Django 1.0. This release includes all of the major features due for inclusion in the final Django 1.0, though some lower-priority items are still scheduled to be included before the 1.0 feature freeze, which will occur with the first beta release next month.

The next step on that path will be the first Django 1.0 beta release, currently scheduled for August 5. If you’d like to help out, please review our documentation for contributors and feel free to join in one of the development sprints scheduled for the run up to 1.0; the full schedule is available in the Django 1.0 release roadmap.

Now when would CakePHP 1.2 be released?

However, to create an administrative application on top of your main CakePHP application is just messy and hard to maintain. One of CakePHP’s most powerful feature is scaffolding where you could declare:

…and all controllers would have scaffolding. Unfortunately, we can’t do such magic on our deployed application. So that leaves us with only one way – make a CakePHP 1.2 Admin application that loads models from our Main application.

In summary, we did this:

1. Create a new application called ‘admin’ to load the database and models from our existing application ‘main’.
2. Load the models and do scaffolding.
3. Create a simple page to link to all our scaffold views.

Ultimately, we want to maintain the admin interface as little as possible. The main application should not have changes in code.

0. Structure for this example

My models are Student, Classroom and Teacher since I like school. Here’s my rough folder structure:

/trunk/admin

• /config
• /controllers
• /views
• /webroot
• app_controller.php
• index.php

/trunk/main

• /config
• /controllers
• /models
  - classroom.php
  - student.php
  - teacher.php
• /views
• /webroot
• app_controller.php
• index.php

1. Bootstrapping in Admin

Edit the Admin ‘bootstrap.php’ in /trunk/admin/config/ to load models from Main application. I’m using Windows Vista, that’s why the C drive.

Previously in CakePHP 1.1, there is loadModel but that has been deprecated in favor of App::Import(‘Model’, $models);.

Also, make sure you have ‘app_model.php’ in your /trunk/main/, i.e. your Main application:

2. Getting our database configuration

We wouldn’t want to maintain another database.php, so the Admin will use Main application’s database settings. Editing Admin’s database.php:

Now we’ll have our models nicely loaded.

3. Setting up Admin’s controllers

We can create a file called ‘app_controller.php’ and place it on /trunk/admin/. We scaffold every controller:

And we create our three controllers – classroom_controller.php, student_controller.php and teacher_controller.php. It looks like this inside classroom_controller.php:

4. The Admin is done

Now, go to your Admin application to see your classrooms. Mine is at http://localhost:7171/classrooms/

If everything is done correctly, you should see your admin interface with the default CakePHP theme.

5. Setup the Admin homepage

There’s nothing at the homepage, let’s put links to our views. Remember that we write the configuration ‘ModelsToLoad’ earlier on? Now it’s time to use it.

Create a file called ‘home.ctp’ in /trunk/admin/views/pages/home.ctp. And throw in the following codes:

The above reads from the array of models and make links for easy access from the homepage.

Conclusion

Although this looks complicated, but it’s quite easy to set up. When you have a new model, add it to ‘ModelsToLoad’ and create the corresponding controller for it. This post is originally titled “How to create a CakePHP admin inteface by loading models from an existing CakePHP application” but that is just too long. I couldn’t locate a guide on using App::import() and how models can be loaded from external applications so I had to look at Cake’s code. Due to limitations of my WordPress plugins, I had to use double quotes instead of single quotes in all my PHP codes.

Once again, CakePHP’s scaffolding is a wonderful feature. Take some time to play with it, the rewards are tremendous.

The page title ($pageTitle) would be ‘Home’ for the above.

If you want your URL to be /about/my-company, you can do the following:

The page title would be ‘My Company’ this time since underscores are converted to spaces. Pretty useful.