Happy Christmas leveille!

How would you like to be able to generate your entire admin backend in one call? Not interesting enough? How about with built in index filters and by writing practically no code? Well... keep reading then :).

As many will now know the Cookbook for CakePHP is now live. Coupled with the Bakery that should mean that documentation, and finding info regarding cake, just got a whole lot easier. These two applications now mean that the scope for this blog is reduced to things that I don't deem either book worthy (not documenting how to use something) or bakery worthy (useful info that is worth sharing) and that leaves... what?

So I'm now left asking myself what do do with this blog - should I be selfish and keep posting useful stuff to it (ego) or should I put info into the book and the bakery where more people will find it (benefit). I think benefit wins, but we'll see what the future brings :).

Happy new year!

Way back in December I found an awesome article by Cakeexplorer on a script to build an image of your db schema. I had been meaning to write such a script for some time, it was great to have it already ticked off the to-do list.

When I first started using cake, bake wasn't around. It took quite some time for me to decide to give it a go, but at that time what bake gave wasn't customizable, as such it's use was limited since it took nearly as much time to bake and edit the files as it did to just write the files (once you know what you are doing that is). Roll the clock forward a bit and bake allowed you to write your own custom templates. It, again, took quite some time for me to take note of the impact of this but it is in reality a big step forwards. Not only can new bakers use bake to get a working editable application, but you can also write your own templates and use bake to get exactly the code you want.

As pointed out in a recent comment, when changing your cake version you may find that some of your hand written config files are nolonger compatible with the version of cake you have selected. However by making use of a a custom production setup there is a way to configure your application defensively and in less lines of code.

Every time I use copy, paste & edit, I'm thinking how to avoid doing so. So whenever I started a new application and moved the files around inline with what I described in the Production Setup article, it annoyed me to have to keep redefining the same variables/constants in slightly different ways with the risk of missing one of them or defining them not-quite-right. After setting up a few projects, I had one of those moments of truth that are normally accompanied by the sound of a penny hitting the floor: By not editing directly the app folder that comes with cake, it would always be available to be referred to in it's pristine, checked out state.