Not too much to report on these days. Been spending most of my time at work and my leasure time going to public lectures. So not a lot of work in the online world. I have been thinking about what I am going to be working on in the New Year, and CakePHP is going to be something that I am going to be putting a lot of time in. I have a couple of projects that I would like to develop and if Cake can do this faster I should learn it.

So one of the things that I found was this podcast. Not sure if it is going to be useful yet, but time will surely tell.

I was stumbling along today and found this great blog post on “Things You Must Know About CakePHP”

There is a lot of great information in here, I especially liked the part on creating simple Admin Sections

Creating a simple admin center

If you need to create an administrative back-end for your CakePHP site and would like all the actions with administrative capabilities to exist under a specific folder, open up config/core.php and uncomment:
define(’CAKE_ADMIN’, ‘admin’);
This will then make all actions that are prefixed with “admin_” to be accessible via:
/admin/yourcontroller/youraction. For instance, if I created an action in my posts controller called “admin_add,” I would access this via: www.example.com/admin/posts/add
From there I could simply password the admin folder to prohibit unwanted users from adding posts.

This is something that I am going to have to use in the current project that I am working on.

And knowing how to make custom 404 pages is really nice to know

Creating a custom 404 error page

If you need to change the page that users see when a document is not found, create:
/app/views/errors/error404.thtml

Last night I started to realize that I don’t have a dedicated credit card for my business transactions.  Sure I have enough cash to cover just about everything and I do 90% of my online business through PayPal, but I have been finding more and more that I think that having a CC to buy that offline stuff that it takes to run an online business would be great.  Especially since I do all of my business stuff through my own name so that I don’t have to register a business number and all of the headaches that takes.  I simply claim all of my earnings on my tax return, however for the last couple of years it wasn’t a big deal since I was able to claim expenses and have the business be revenue neutral.

This year however I don’t think that I am going to have that luxury.  I have not had as much time to do investing in online properties so I have been accumulating cash, which is not a bad thing, it just means that I am going to be taxed on it at the end of the year.

Last night I had a pleasant surprise, my new bike was home.  I have a friend building me a new bike since I wrecked my old one.  I have been without for about 2 weeks, and it has been tough.  I don’t think that it is “finished” but it is more than done to get me around before the snow starts to fly.  And then I can get all of the bells and whistles finished.

As for my CakePHP project, I haven’t had a lot of time to spend on it.  I am starting to think that it would be much faster to drop the MCV, but maybe that is simply because I am not sure what I am doing yet.  I am going to work on it as is until the new year,  I think that I should have a good BETA online by then.  In the meantime I am going to start to work on a front end.  This is going to be a ready made CMS, probably Drupal since that is what I know, however since Mambo is going Cake I may decide to look at that for this site, since I am going to have a cake install anyway.

I am trying to do some work with cake, but I am having some issues. One of the biggest at this point is the lack of documentation. Another is a lack of examples. All of the examples that I have seen at this point have been very simple lists, or blogs. Nothing that has a lot of data manipulation in it. That all said, maybe I am just not looking in the right places. If anyone has good links were I can learn this better, please let me know in the comments.

Also I am having a problem finding developers to help me out.

If I was going to do this without a framework I would simply hope over to DP and post an ad. Within a couple of hours I would have a number of responses and quotes that I could come back and look through. When I specify that the app must be built on the Cake framework I see the tumbleweeds.

Oh yeah there is one out there that is VERY good, however their costs are currently out of my price range.

One of the best things about getting started with cake is the scaffold variable. But once you get the associations, and the tables ready you can use bake to set up all of that boring stuff. Like the initial controllers, models and views.

To take full advantage of bake however you need to use the console, and to set up that you have to watch this.