The Bakery: Five New Articles, Tutorials and Helpers
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The Bakery has five new items they've recently posted - a few new articles, helper information and tutorials. Here's the list:   CSV Helper - I was recently outputting some comma-delimited data and thought I would benefit from a simple csv helper p28n, the top to bottom persistent internationalization tutorial - For some developers, allowing a website to support multiple languages is essential. Luckily cakePHP 1.2 has the foundations available to make this possible. Tracking navigation history of a user - Many times it can be very useful to track the navigation history of a user. [...] With this HistoryComponent, it's extremely easy to handle such actions. Habtm hacks to menage columns in both models - I had a habtm relationship between two models and when i did a "findall" in a model i couldn't filter the rows with a clause from the the other model. SecureGet Component - I am not pretending this can replace ACL or more complex implementation, it's just a small component, inspired a bit from the Security component.   If you're a CakePHP developer, you'd do well to check out The Bakery for these and more great Cake-related articles, tutorials and information.
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Okay, non-interview stuff first. I've recently picked up several 'shortcuts' from O'Reilly and Addison-Weseley.  I love this format.  For about 10 bucks, you can get a PDF only copy of a 50-100 page "book".  The shortcuts (so far at least) have been very focused, which allows them to cover a reasonable topic in sufficient depth without creating a monstrous 600+ page tome.  The shortcuts I've looked at so far have been timely, useful, and a great value.  October marks the beginning of Apress' push into Ruby and Ruby on Rails.    Apress also has Practical OCaml coming out soon to help soothe your inner functional programmer.  Now, on to interview news!
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted a review of Theo Schlossnagle's book from the Developer's Library series "Scalable Internet Architectures".   I had the pleasure of meeting Theo Schlossnagle at OSCON 2006. He gave me 30 minutes to peek inside his brain and do an interview. 30 minutes just was not enough time. So when I received his latest book in the mail I was excited. Finally a chance to get more in-depth on some of the topics we covered. I've taken the time to collect my thoughts for you here so you can decide whether this book is a good one for you.   Cal talks about how he hated the book (from a reviewer's perspective, not a developer), the contents of the book, and his personal favorite section - "Distributed Databases are Easy, Just Read the Fine Print". His only critism is that the book seems to come across in a "demanding" tone (misunderstood by those that don't know Theo's style as just being matter of fact).
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About two weeks ago I received a call from my friend Brian Smith of SingleFeed and Comparison Engines for some feedback on the addition of new and customized attributes to the Google Base (Froogle) shopping feed.  Brian covered these attributes on his SingleFeed blog but he did not get deep into what these attributes can [...]
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New chapters in the portal's quest for user-generated content.
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Hasin Hayder has started up a new project that he's documented in a new blog entry - the creation of a new jobs website in PHP.   I was involved in making a job site few days ago. During the development, I have studied how easily anyone can develop a job site using PHP (language independent in true sense) . So I decide to write a blog post about my experience and here it goes. But note that this article is not about scaling or balancing the load on your site during heavy traffic, heh heh.   He comments on the startup process surrounding this type of site and makes suggestions about something to consider for your careers site - pulling job content from other sites in two ways - screen scraping and using the job search APIs out there.
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Search Engine Roundtable, the blog of Barry Schwartz, has updated with a much more slick and streamlined design. I&#8217;ve been eagerly awaiting for the day that Barry updates his design as his company, Rusty Brick, puts out some incredible work and his personal blog, CartoonBarry, is top of the shelf in blog functionality. Excellent job Mr. Schwarzt!
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The Bakery (the CakePHP repository) has posted a few new things recently with topics ranging from Javascript helpers to new behaviors. Here's the latest:   JSMin Helper Compress and cache javascript Yahoo weather component Using JpGraph Protip Helper Breadcrumb helper Showing a text excerpt around multiple keywords ConditionalValidation behavior CakeSWXPHP   As always, you can find these and lots more great CakePHP-related content over on The Bakery.
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The Bakery (a CakePHP project) has seven new items posted ranging from an article about handling 500 errors on shared hosting to a tutorial about at Wizard component:   Multiple flashes with different classes - There were a couple of things I didn't like about using $this->Session->setFlash(), so I wrote my own method for saving flashes and helper for displaying them. Wizard Component Tutorial - A tutorial on using my Wizard Component which automates several aspects Wizard Component - Automates several aspects of multi-page forms 500 Errors With 1and1 Hosting/Apache 1.x - When I uploaded a Cake-based site to a 1and1 shared hosting account, I got some mysterious 500 errors despite the site working perfectly on my dev machine. Cakephp footnotes (on base of notepad_plus_plus). Part I. Basic solution -  It is very usefull during development if you have ability of navigation dirrectly to source code from explorer page. I create such solution for my editor Notepad++. CDfuse.com: A Complete Rebuild with CakePHP - When it came time to rebuild CDfuse.com, CakePHP became our framework of choice. Here's how we completed our transition and what we hope to accomplish in the future. Easy Syntax Highlighting in UltraEdit - UltraEdit was my answer for enabling .thtml syntax highlighting without hassle. Change two lines in the UltraEdit config. file, and .thtml files rely on previous settings for html and PHP highlighting.   Check out The Bakery for more great CakePHP related content.
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Felix Geisendorfer is in the process of moving his blog from Wordpress to a customized "light-weight CakePHP replacement" he's developing to be extended later on. His post shares some of the tips he found so far.   In this post I'm simply going to throw out some snippets to show how I'm currently approaching the whole process in order to give both my insight into what works and what doesn't, while also hoping to get some people to share their insight into migrating legacy apps to CakePHP.   The tip in this post is primarily about the database side of things - his porting over of the information from the Wordpress table model to his new customized schema. His code example for the migration is included.
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Due to the new advancements Google has made in their Analytics API (Datasource) functionality, the API changed slightly and the code that Felix Geisendorfer had created to work with a CakePHP install wasn't working anymore. He's corrected the problem with this new post with the new code and an example of its use.   In a very productive CakePHP session with nate a couple weeks ago in Atlanta I finally implemented some new HttpSocket stuff that was needed (minimal support for cookies / ssl) for creating the new API as a datasource. Now that its done I'm fairly happy with the outcome of the new API.   You can download the source here and follow his simple two-ish step process for getting it working on your site and with your Google account.
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David Skalr shares some good news on the publishing front - the latest version (second edition) of the "PHP Cookbook" is rolling off the presses.   The new edition of PHP Cookbook is on the way! I got one copy yesterday, so it should be making its way into bookstores and online-bookstore-warehouses any day now.   Updates included in this edition are:  revamped XML and OOP sections new PDO information information on testing code performance tuning regular expressions  Check out the O'Reilly page of the book for complete information.
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The Bakery has a new helper posted today for those working with images in their applications that need to resize and cache them easily.   This helper resizes an image on the fly and places it in an image cache directory for later use. Make sure your imagecache directory is writable. Future editions could include a cropping function.   The full code of the class is provided in both a cut and paste-able format and for download. There's an example of the sample usage included as well.
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A look at the people who are behind the scenes of Flavours.
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Solar fans will be happy to see (as mentioned in the latest post from Paul Jones) that all of the previous (and future) posts he's been making as tutorials on certain parts of the framework have been integrated into the Solar manual.   The translation went pretty quickly, because I wrote the original blog entries using Solar_Markdown, which converted them to HTML for the blog. Then I did some quick edits and re-converted them using Solar_Markdown_Wiki (which is the markup format for all the class API and manual entries at the Solar website).   Posts adapted so far include the posts covering views and layouts, using HTTP and sending email from Solar.
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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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Gabe: We did a really awesome project (can I say it"s awesome, is that okay?) for Wired magazine. You can either go pick up the most recent issue and read it there or check it out on their site. They asked us to do a piece for them handicapping all three of the next generation systems. We tried to be as fair as we could and hopefully you"ll get a kick out of it.