Then a few months ago I read this blog post and discovered that someone had created similar functionality for CakePHP, in the form of a model behavior. Although it’s not quite as powerful as it’s Rails cousin, it does let you define named scopes for any model quite easily. However, I wasn’t crazy about a few things.

Named Scopes are defined like this:

The above format means we can only pass find conditions to a named scope, and cannot pass any other params, such as ORDER and FIELDS.

Then a named scope is then called like this:

I have to pass enough params to a find call as it is, so I don’t want anymore.

What I want to do is this:

and this

I can even do this:

Much improved I think, and so much more powerful. So I’ve only gone and coded the damn thing! You can find my version of Named Scope for Cake on Github at http://github.com/joelmoss/cakephp-namedscope.

And you know what? Thanks to the power of CakePHP, the actual code is seven lines shorter than the aforementioned version.

So I began to think about how I could refactor Migrations into a plugin, rather than a bunch of files that you drop into your vendors directory. And that took me all of 20 seconds! I didn’t have to change a thing. Thanks to this latest commit, you can now use a shell script from any plugin.

So I just drop the migrations directory directly into my plugins directory, and wham bam thank you maam! I created my first Cake plugin.

Of course, I can still drop the migrations shells into my global vendors/shells directory, but I just like the way I can plug it in.

So a plugin is now the recommended way to use Migrations.

The core.php file within your app’s config directory is used to store application wide configuration variables. Things like your debug level, cache settings and sessions store are set here using Cake’s very useful Configure class. This file can start to get quite large and unruly as the development of your app progresses. So one of the first things I do when I start a new app, is to separate my custom application config variable into another file within the config directory. This then keeps the core Cake configure settings separate from your custom ones, and keeps things a little dry.

Just create a new file in your app/config directory. You can name this anything you want, but I usually go with something like ‘config.php’ or ‘app.php’. As long as it ends with ‘.php’, it doesn’t matter.

Then in your app/config/core.php file, add the following line to the top of the file:

Configure::load('config');

As long as you pass the name of your newly created file, then it will be fine. So the above will work if I created a file called app/config/config.php.

Then within your new config file, you can set any config variables you wish. However, you don’t use the familar Configure::write('name', 'value'); convention. The variables that you set within your custom config file should be specified using arrays. Like this:

$config['name'] = ‘value’;

All variables in this file only, should set within the $config array as array name/value pairs. If your custom config file is called ‘app.php’, then the array name would be $app. So effectively, you could create as many of these custom config files as you wish. Perhaps if you had distinct sections of the app. I usually just create one, so I can easily access my custom config vars, without worrying about Cake’s built in config vars.

You access these custom config variables in the exact same way as you would any of the other built in core config vars.

Configure::read('name');

Enjoy!

So I just completed the switch for CakePHP DB Migrations. The source is now available on Github and is open to any pull requests. If you have any funky new features, or really need a bug fixed quickly, please feel free to fork the project. But please remember to send me a pull request.

I also moved the Google Code wiki into Github, and enhanced it a little. The wiki now includes some YAML migration examples, and will be expanded with more info and tutorials as and when I can.

The final step of the move, are the tickets/issues. And because it works so nicely with Github, I decided upon using Lighthouse. So any bug reports, and/or feature requests should now be sent to Lighthouse.

Thanks again for all the support. My hope in moving to Github, is that I can enhance the community aspect of this project, and to encourage more involvement from those of you who use it. I’m all ears!

PHPShop

The Google Group revealed some interesting news about a well know open source PHP shopping cart application. It appears that the next version of PHPShop will be built with CakePHP 1.2. That can be nothing but positive for Cake Land.

Google No. 1

Search for “PHP framework” on Google, and guess what? Cake is now number one! Oh yes, NUMBER 1! Top of the pops!

Debug Kit

Not content with being one of the biggest contributors to the core, Mark Story has created a plugin for CakePHP to help with debugging your applications. The Cake DebugKit, which is now publicly available at GitHub, is similar to the extremely helpful Debug Bar that can be found in the Symfony framework. It displays at the top right of your screen, and shows you info about your app, such as load time and SQL queries.

It’s early days, but its a great start, and is something that is sorely needed in Cake. I hope to help out with it myself. And the idea of including it in a plugin is genius, and has made me realise how powerful the plugin architecture has become in 1.2

TextMate Bundle

Also on GitHub, you can now find another version of the Cake TextMate bundle. But this one is somewhat official, in that it is being maintained by Nate; Cake’s Lead Dev.

So thats it for this issue of Cake Nibbles, but I hope to post again soon.

If you have any interesting, or non-interesting news in Cake land, please let me know.

v4.0 is now available in all its glory at the Google Code repo at http://code.google.com/p/cakephp-migrations so get it while it is hot.

You can download it here.

I plan on creating a new screencast soon(ish), that will include all the updated features and shortcuts, and will also be easier to hear me and will hopefully be a little shorter and concise. But until then, please play around and let me know if you have any questions at all.

Here’s the changes taken directly from the changelog:


[*] errr… lots of fixes
[*] Fixed bug with old style version numbers
[*] Fixed bug where fkeys were trying to be created with auto_increment
[+] Can now specify whether to use Cake’s UUID for the ID column within migration files. Example: “id: uuid”
[+] Can now pass “id: false” within migration file, and no ID column will be created.
[-] Deprecated “no_id: true” in favour of “id: false”
[*] ID column is now correctly set as Primary Key when using UUID type.
[+] Added support for MySQL specific table options (comments, engine/type, collate and charset)
[+] Version numbers now use timestamps so as to minimize conflicts
[+] Now supports interleaved migrations;
when migrating up, will run migrations that have not yet been run, and will ignore any non-run migrations when running down.
[+] Added info option (cake migrate info), which shows information on migrations
[+] Can now specify version number when running up/down, thus allowing you to only run the up/down block of a specific migration
[+] Schema table name is now customizable
[+] Now supports PHP arrays in migration files

I hope to write more about these when I don’t have so much decorating on the house to do.

Although I have been a small part of this, and helped by committing some fixes and enhancements, constraints on my time and family life have kept a some what tight lid on my commitment to contributing. But I hope to change that once 1.2 goes stable. As some of you know, I already have some cool new features waiting in my unofficial CakePHP Github repo. So hopefully these will appear in the core of 1.3, or maybe even 2.0!

Oh and by the way, a little bird tells me that Cake will be ditching SVN after 1.2 is released, and will be embracing Git and Github in all its glory. Watch this space!

Second exciting piece of news was the release of a new episode of The Show. It’s been a long period of quiet since the last show aired, so this episode is well worth the wait. Well, I am assuming it is, as we only got a one hour heads up from Nate, on Twitter. And that was when I was fast asleep. So I will will have to wait for the episode to be put online.

So congrats to all. I would also have to agree with Nate, on naming Mark Story, the man who has contributed the most to this release than any other person. So everyone please enjoy Mark Story Day!

Just released ModelBaker this week and going to private beta this weekend. Getting some real nice feedback.

Naturally this piqued my interest, and as most of my Twitter followers do so because of my work with CakePHP, I Googled Modelbaker and Widgetpress and found a site at WidgetPress.com, and ultimately the following video…

So basically, someone has created a Mac application, that can build a CakePHP web application without any coding knowledge at all. It lets you build your models, views and controllers, and even builds helpers for you. I also saw something about a template system, that lets you create a new Cake app based on a predefined application template.

Now this is not really something that I would use, as I’m one of them hard core developers who use a text editor (and enjoy doing so), but it is a great idea for beginners, and could do wonders for CakePHP and its community. I wish I could tell you more, but I want to reserve judgement and any further comments until I have actually tried this out. As soon as I do, I will be sure to let you all know.

You can see a bigger and better quality version of this screencast on the WidgetPress website, but needless to say it is very, very interesting, and testament to how powerful and easy to use CakePHP really is.

A few days ago, I found another one of those Discovered Genius’, and wrote a quick Twitter post on it. A few moments later, I wrote another, using that Discovered Genius that I had just found. And thus, a new blog was born at DiscoveredGenius.com.

I downloaded the latest copy of Wordpress, installed it on my Mac, then proceeded to create a theme and add my favourite plugins. I uploaded it to my server, and began to write the first post.

So…

The idea is simple; every time I discover any sort of Genius that is in any way or form related to the Internet, or indeed, anything at all, I will write about here. It not only means I have a quick and easy way to keep tabs on the best stuff that I discover, but it lets me share it all with you, my dear reader.

The first Discovered Genius has already arrived, so head on over there. If you discover any that I may have missed, or simply overlooked, please drop me a line at joel [at] discoveredgenius [dot] com. I’m all ears!

And let me know your thoughts.

For the last few months, I’ve been developing an application which I hope to release to the unsuspecting public very soon. So I wanted to get it on my server and tested remotely, which I promptly did by checking out a copy from my SVN repository. I also did the same for the Cake core, by checking out https://svn.cakephp.org/repo/branches/1.2.x.x/cake.

Great, all worked fine… until I spotted loads of errors in the app. I then remembered that I made some local changes to the Cake core. I know, I know, it’s a cardinal sin. But I really needed these changes for this app, and it was doing nobody any harm, as they stayed on my local machine. But now, I also needed them on my remote copy on the server, but want to be able to ’svn up’ the cake core, whenever there are updates.

So I figured the best way would actually be to use a different SCM just for this purpose. I’d played with Git a little, and have been really impressed at Github. So I created a public repo at Github, and proceeded to create a clone of the Cake SVN repo, which I then pushed to the public repo at Github. I then applied my custom changes, and now we have a mirror of the CakePHP 1.2 branch at https://github.com/joelmoss/cakephp/tree.

I can now clone the new git repo on my remote server, and I have a copy of CakePHP with all my custom changes, which I can update as and when I need to. This is all assuming of course, that I regulalry update the repo from the Cake SVN repo.

So things have actually turned out quite well. Please feel free to push and pull to/from the new git repo, and let me know your thoughts.