Tag Archives: CakePHP

Officially published my CakePHP Book

Posted by Jamie on May 19, 2011 1,331 comments

Finally!  It has been a long time in the making, but my book is finally finished and published!  About two years ago, I began the undertaking of writing a book.  At the time it was merely a hobby while I was working on my blog.  Seeing if I could turn the success of my blog articles into a book.

As you may recall a few months ago, I released an e-book.  This e-book was basically my original works written for CakePHP 1.2.  I saw some success with the e-book, so that made me believe that I should seek publishing on my book.  Unfortunately, there isn’t much hope for mainstream success with a big publisher like O’Reilly because CakePHP is too small of a niche for them to focus on.

During this time, I focused on upgrading the book to be relevant to CakePHP 1.3.  I even added a special bonus chapter about upgrading from CakePHP 1.2 to 1.3, which I must say was extremely painless; especially if you stick with the standards.

Anyways, I hope you take the opportunity to view my CakePHP book.

Enjoy!

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CakePHP 1.2 VS 1.3 VS 2.0 Page Request Times

Posted by Jamie on March 7, 2011 2,453 comments

When I first started using CakePHP a few years ago, we had a lot of complaints about speed.  If you do some Google searches comparing CakePHP to other frameworks, it seems to be near the bottom of the pack.  I previously wrote a few articles on optimizing CakePHP here:

Implementing the following tips certainly helped; however, if there are issues with the core framework response time, no amount of optimization will truley help.  So after reading up on CakePHP 2.0 and it’s recent speed improvements, I wanted to do some straight CakePHP comparisons.  Below are 10 load times for CakePHP 1.2, 1.3, and the new 2.0.  These load times are of a brand new install simply loading the default home view, no database connection or any model loading. Read more »

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AJAX Star Rating Plugin For CakePHP

Posted by Jamie on March 2, 2011 2,057 comments

First off, I didn’t write this plugin, I was browsing CakePHP’s plugin bakery and it came from there:
http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/schneimi/2010/08/19/ajax-star-rating-plugin-1

This is an excellent plugin and very easy-to-use.  The above article is extremely detailed and provides excellent step-by-step instructions to set it up and get it running.

In reviewing the comments, like any self-made plugins there were a few issues encountered and ironed out along the way, so if you run into any issues be sure to search the comments.
Enjoy this excellent Star Rating Plugin for your next or current CakePHP site!

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CakePHP 2-0 Ajax Pagination WITHOUT The Pages

Posted by Jamie on February 28, 2011 2,262 comments

As I promised in this article, I have created a full CakePHP example of performing AJAX pagination without the pages.  The goal of this article is to display news articles to a user.  As the user scrolls down, we will dynamically load in additional content so they can continue to scroll and read.

One of our challenges is to not load too much or too little content.  For more details on this, please review the theory article.  Let’s begin. Read more »

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CakePHP CSS Enhancements From 1.2 To 1.3

Posted by Jamie on February 23, 2011 1,905 comments

This article does seem a bit late since CakePHP 2.0 is on it’s way.  However, I felt it prudent to point out a few things that I’m really happy to see in the new default CSS provided by CakePHP.

On CakePHP’s website, you will find an excellent migration guide from 1.2 to 1.3 here:
http://book.cakephp.org/view/1561/Migrating-from-CakePHP-1-2-to-1-3

It describes in great detail the various changes throughout the entire application and there are a lot of them.  But I think it left out some of the most important stuff, the default CSS provided for people who use the bakery to create their websites!

One of the things that irked me in 1.2 was I had to manually update the paginator helper to display what field is currently being sorted on.  Many times I had to ensure my peers were also doing the same thing and a lot of time was wasted checking this and ensuring it was done correctly. Read more »

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Publishing an e-book on Smashwords

Posted by Jamie on February 7, 2011 1,980 comments

I feel a little bit behind in the times on this one, but I’ll work to catch up quickly.  Over the past year or so I’ve been compiling samples and I put together a book for developing CakePHP websites.  I saught publishing on the book, but unfortunately all of the big name publishers felt that CakePHP is too small of a market.

After being rejected, I wasn’t too sure what to do with the book.  So, I left it for a while.  Then, earlier this week through some Google searching I stumbled upon the idea of an e-book.  Previously I’ve associated e-books with “Get rich quick schemes” as you see a lot of websites selling e-books along those lines.

I started investigating this option a bit more and I found some videos about creating e-books with Adobe Indesign and formatting them for the various readers.  This quickly started sounding like a lot of work!  Instead I searched for other solutions.  That’s when I found it: Smashwords.  This is an incredible service.  You upload your Word Document and they automatically convert it for the over 10 e-book options out there!  Not only that, they will sell it and promote it on your behalf. Read more »

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Using the TextHelper with CakePHP

Posted by Jamie on January 24, 2011 1,869 comments

Really, the TextHelper?  Yes, this is probably one of the most overlooked helpers in CakePHP.  Sure we all know about the HTML Helper, Form Helper, JS Helper, etc… but how many of us use the Text Helper?  I’ve seen so many custom functions for truncating text and adding an ellipsis (…) to the end of it.  How about replacing email addresses with links?  Etc…  No more I say!  Let’s begin explorining the Text Helper now. Read more »

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Modifying the CakePHP Bakery Templates

Posted by Jamie on January 3, 2011 2,096 comments

One of the keys to a successful website is a good user flow.  What defines a good user flow?  At the very core, it requires simple navigation, being able to find what you’re looking for, and being able to do it quickly.  CakePHP’s bakery let’s you quickly create websites that list, add, edit, and delete data.  All you need to do is create a database table and run a few simple bakery commands and this will be done for you.

The basic templates provided are pretty good.  They include links to do all of the above as well as pagination and sortable headers on the table listing page.  I find them a little bland and very “techie”.  Most customers don’t like this, so let’s alter them to suit are needs. Read more »

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Maintaining the back button with AJAX

Posted by Jamie on December 28, 2010 2,136 comments

Last week I blogged about whether or not you can use too much AJAX on your website.  The short answer was no; with one caveat being that you must not lose the user interaction experience.  In this scenario I’m referring to the back button.  If the user has “felt” like the content changed, they are likely to click the back button to return.  If they do this, it’s important for them to “go back” to where they “think” they were and not the last page that was loaded without AJAX!  I’ve put together a quick example of how to do this. Read more »

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Optimizing CakePHP Websites

Posted by Jamie on January 20, 2010 2,221 comments

CakePHP offers a lot of functionality to us as developers. The ability to develop websites rapidly provides a trade-off in how quickly the website will load. As we expand our skills, we will learn the techniques that will slow down/speed up performance.

Objectives

  • Apply techniques to speed up CakePHP’s load time
  • Optimize our queries
  • Cache query results

Read more »

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