The Bakery: PremierMarinas.com, ScienceHack.com and an iPhone App
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On The Bakery today, there's three new examples of how the CakePHP framework was used to create three very different types of sites - PremierMarinas.com, ScienceHack.com and a simple iPhone-compatible application.   In the first article they describe how they built a "powerful, full featured CMS" to allow their customers to login and work with their personal information. It included the use of JSON messaging and the use of dynamic libraries. The article for the second site talks about the creation of a search engine for science videos to provide a more reliable resource for fellow video enthusiasts. He talks about what all he learned in the process and the design of the application. Check out the end result here. Finally, the third article talks about the creation of an application for the iPhone - "an app that would allow other users to add RSS feeds and I could go look for some and add them to my collection". He details the process he went through to create the application and the modules that he used to accomplish it.   Check out the rest of The Bakery for more great CakePHP-related articles and tutorials.
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Michael Kimsal (and his bother Mark) were talking about the state of ecommerce applications, specifically about the latest "hot topic" software - Magento.   My brother Mark has been doing a long term project based on Magento doing a lot of custom work on top of it, and has told me many points, both good and bad, about it.    According to Michael and Mark, speed of the application is a big hindrance. They also mention two points that could help make an ecommerce system so much easier to integrate into the "blogosphere" - publishing a blog feed of some of the user feedback about orders/products/etc and accept trackbacks from an external blog post reviewing the products.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Zend Developer Zone: Book Review: Learning PHP Data ObjectsProDevTips: Writing a CMS/Community with Smarty and the Zend Framework: Part 7Ivo Jansch's Blog: Book announcement: Enterprise PHP DevelopmentEvan Sims' Blog: Announcing libGameFlySite News: Popular Posts for the Week of 12.28.2007Reinhold Weber's Blog: From PHP to Ruby - 30 similarities and differencesSanisoft Blog:  Theming your CakePHP apps (V1.2)John Lim's Blog: Why Should PHP ever be taught in school?Zend Developer Zone: Profiling PHP Applications With xdebugCommunity News: A Look Back at 2007
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Blog: A first look at Searchles: a new web app that seeks to combine social networking with web search functionalities.
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Chris Hartjes is taking on what he calls his "next foolish project" - a console for the CakePHP framework.   On the CakePHP mailing list, somebody familiar with Ruby on Rails' console functionality asked "why isn't there one of these in Cake?" [...] So I got to thinking about how to do this. On the surface, it seems the easiest way to do this is to write a PHP script that takes entries on the command line, run the input through an 'eval' statement. Sounds easy enough, and I could write that in a hurry. I think the trickiness comes in figuring out how to hook it into CakePHP so that you can access Models that already exist.   For those attending the Vancouver PHP Conference, attend his talk and you might get  amention of how far he's come with the idea. Otherwise, stay tuned to his blog for updates.
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Movie & video, book, images, software (games & program) and music cataloguer / database. Uses online web services (amazon, imdb, musicbrainz, freedb). Skinnable, highly customizable, reporting. Supports DVD, many audio & video file formats and Audio CD'.   Although I planned on releasing the production version at this moment I have decided against this. At the last moment I decided on changing the working of the online search drastically (see the change log for more information). As this is quite fundamental a second beta came to mind. Please help me testing in this release!   My thanks to the many persons emailing me, posting their issues in the forums and logging their bugs an request at Sourceforge.net!            Presented By     Play PSP Games Online at Thousands of T-Mobile HotSpot Locations Nationwide      Unleash the power of your PSP(r) system through thrilling online gaming against players from around the world.  And now - you can play PSP games online at thousands of T-Mobile HotSpot locations nationwide with six months of complimentary T-Mobile HotSpot Wi-Fi service! www.playstation.com/    Ads by Pheedo
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The IBM developerWorks site brings the community another great tutorial today, this time looking at the CakePHP framework and the creation of a simple application with it.    In "Cook up Web sites fast with CakePHP, Part 1: Adding related information and services", they build a sample application (Tor) from the ground up (installation guide and all) that will take in a username and password on a login page. Their goal is to show you how much time you could safe by using the framework over just the usual library-based (or procedural) programming methods.   You will need to be a bit familiar with PHP and the Model/View/Controller design pattern before you get started here, but if you have that down, you can just jump right in. You'll also either need to register with the site or log in with your account information to get to the good stuff.
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:Symfony Project: Book preview: read the Unit Tests chapterWebCheatSheet.com: Secure File Upload with PHPMichi Kono's Blog: The Best PHP Book Out ThereThe Bakery: Basic User Authentication in (CakePHP) 1.2.xPHPBuilder.com: Dynamic XML with PHPDavid Coallier's Blog: Zend_Db Without PDO part #3 (SVN Repository)?Community News: PHPLondon Conference 2007 AnnouncedMatthew O'Phinney's Blog: Overloading arrays in PHP 5.2.0Ilia Alshanetsky's Blog: 5.2.1 RC3 Released for testingJob Posting: Telio Telecom AS Seeks Senior Web Developer (Oslo, Norway)The Bakery: LightTPD and CakePHP setup in subdirectoriesJob Posting: Yahoo! Seeks Address Book Front-End Engineer (Sunnyvale, CA)HowTo Forge: PHP Programming BasicsJob Posting: Blue State Digital Seeks PHP/AJAX developer for politcal/tech consulting (Boston, MA)Zend Developer Zone:  AJAX Chat Tutorial Part 7 : Usability Improvements
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Lukas Smith has posted his review of a book from Packt Publishing - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!"   Duane from Pakt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing a few books for them in my blog. I picked "Mashup Projects" from the list of just released books, since I am interesting in the topic and I am actually going to give a presentation at the internal "PHP Day" we are doing at Optaros in November.   He points out the good (good writing style, well-chosen examples) and the bad (a log list of errors and oversights in the code). He also talks about the contents of the book - the different examples and the final more major project. Overall though, he sees it as a good book, one that would be a good introduction to mashups for PHP developers (if you look past the formatting issues).
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Ben Ramsey has put together a dashboard widget to grab the latest from the Funcaday.com website (spotlights one PHP function each day).   While reading through news and blog entries, I came across a post on Zend's Developer Zone about Paul Reinheimer's new PHP Function a Day website. The Function a Day site functions in much the same way as those nifty tear-off-a-page-per-day desktop calendars we all buy for those on our Christmas shopping lists for whom we can't quite figure out what to get.   TO help out the lazy out there, he's created this widget to grab the latest image from the funcaday website and pull it right into your Dashboard.
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Nick Halstead has posted the winner of the PHP programming competition - Todd Pinel:   Where do I start with my praise for ToddÃ¢ÂÂs entry? So much effort has been put into this entry its amazing. As a starting point you should first go have a look yourselves, Todd has helpfully already hosted it here. Let the praise begin..   Nick goes through the presentation of the application, the documentation provided with it, some sample code of the main portion of the app (a priorityQueue class) and the rankings that each judge gave it.   You can download your application and try it out for yourself.
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Felix Geisendorfer has a new post today showing off an example of his screencasting abilities. Specifically, the video looks at using vendor branching to keep your CakePHP installation up to date.   So here I go with my very first screencast to be published. The topic is how to use vendor branching with CakePHP which is one of many ways to keep your CakePHP version up to date.   The video is 15(ish) minutes long and covers, from start to finish, the process of grabbing the latest CakePHP build from the subversion repository and install it automatically to your system.   As a plus, Felix also includes links to the software he used to make the screencast for those that are curious.
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The Bakery has a few new articles, helpers, components - even an event posted including:   Want to order your SQL Persian Date Helper Using equalTo Validation To Compare Two Form Fields CakeFest: 2008-02-06, Orlando, FL Asset Mapper Modified Preorder Tree Traversal Component Ajax elements available anywhere Bindable Behavior: control your model bindings   Keep an eye on The Bakery for more great CakePHP-related content.
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On the Zend Developer Zone today, there's this new tutorial that looks at making the move from PHP4's object-oriented programming up to the "more complete obejct model of PHP5" - specifically with the Decorator design pattern.   While working on a project I realized one particular solution was a pretty good way to demonstrate the decorator design pattern together with some of PHP5's features, including abstract classes, interfaces, type hinting, the final keyword and the visibility of properties and methods. This article is intended for those of you who, like myself, are moving from object-oriented programming, including some use of design patterns, in PHP4, to the more complete object model of PHP5.   He sets up a scenario about the development of an online pizza ordering system to show how to "decorate" a pizza with each of the toppings on a list (instead of having to list out every pizza in every possible topping combination). Of course, all of the code is included and explained so you understand exactly what's happening. Finally, there's a demonstration of its usage - a simple call that grabs the stock level/name/cost of each of the items in stock (pizza combinations).
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Also: Color Sudoku game adds twist to computing. See what people are saying on News.com Extra.
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The âVar Guyâ at TechIQ Magazine offers âfive reasons why Appleâs retail strategy is crushing the competition this holiday season:â Simplicity, Quality, Integration, Expertise, and Design. As an example, the Var Guy contrasts buying a Windows smartphone with buying an iPhone: âbuy the iPhone (five minute process), link it to your Mac (five minute process), and activate the iPhone online (five minute process), and youâll be wondering why Appleâs approach isnât the norm for the entire cell phone industry.â
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Over the last week, I've been writing about the disconnect between flow and rank. Paradoxically, sites that are ranked high don't always deliver a lot of hits when they link to you. On the flipside, there are some sites that are rarely on Top 100 lists, or talked about very much, that deliver substantial flow. Two of them stand out, one a veteran site, and the other a relative newcomer. 1. Daring Fireball is a thoughtful blog written by John Gruber that focuses on the Macintosh. Since I've returned to the Mac in 2005, and have been writing more about Mac issues, I've started getting links from this site, and when I do, they usually send between 1000 and 2000 readers my way. And they're generally interesting people with useful information and ideas. I follow Gruber on Twitter and have learned that he is a Phillies fan and therefore disappointed this year. His posts are interesting there too, and irreverent, which I like of course.  2. A Digg-like memetracker, news.ycombinator.com is in the same league as TechMeme, about 1000 hits for a highly ranked piece. I don't know much about the site, I'm not a regular reader, and I don't know much about the people who visit from this site.