End Your If

CakePHP offers a really nice built-in tree management.  In fact, at a bare minimum you simply need to create a table with 2 extra columns, tell your model to act like a “tree” and rather than doing a find(‘all’) you do a generatetreelist() or a find(‘threaded’) and CakePHP takes care of the rest.

After doing a quick test, I was quite impressed with what CakePHP did for me, but I was not satisified.  I wanted to create a really slick category management system that I can re-use and show off.  Well, in this tutorial I go about 90% of the way.  The only thing I didn’t have time to finish was, rather than redrawing my tree through AJAX, use DHTML and dynamically update my tree after dragging and dropping.  Don’t worry, I plan to finish this with a part two soon. More »

In today’s article we are going to create a very basic blog that allows people to create a post and posts comments on that post via AJAX.  We are going to keep it extremely basic and just focus on that actual AJAX functionality.

Ready? Let’s begin.  We are going to start by creating two database tables: posts and posts_comments.  Below is a sample create statement for the posts table: More »

When I created my first personal CakePHP web site, this was something that had me quite frustrated.  I struggled and struggled to figure out and understand how to do a simple “if I change this select box, how can I populate another one”.

I had previously done this a million times in other languages with a simple “onchange()” function that would do my AJAX and populate my other select box.

To solve this problem, I checked CakePHP’s web site and did not find anything useful.  Don’t forget this was almost a year ago, I find the web site has come a long way now.  Because I couldn’t find a could example, I did the next best thing, I dove write into the form helper and ajax helper.  Shortly after, I found enough information to start my trial and error process.

Excellent, now we are getting some where.  Now that we know this, let’s create our two select boxes and make our second one populate through AJAX. More »

At my work it’s quite clear to me that a lot of people have difficulty with both AJAX and drag and drop functionality.  In this article, I thought I would provide a realistic and simplistic example of how to accomplish both AJAX and drag and drop together.

By the end of this article you will be able to create an extremely slick content management system that works really smoothly. More »

I think a good place to start is to describe one of my favorite tools.  It’s called Firebug, it’s an add-on for Mozilla browsers.

At work, if one of my co-workers comes to me in the J-Block and asks a Javascript or CSS question, before I even consider helping them I ask if they reviewed the styles or the Javascript in Firebug.  9 times out 10 if it’s a really easy answer, you’ll see it almost immediately with the help of Firebug. More »