Our team has been using CakePHP for over 3 years and it is our framework of choice for custom web application development.  Some of you may have even used some of our plugins or helpers we have contributed.   As our company grows we are looking for ways to contribute to the community more and therefore plan to release more code over the upcoming year.

In addition to development, our team offers CakePHP consulting for teams or developers, so don’t be afraid to get in touch with us if you need some guidance.

We will have 3 team members (Donatas, Joey, and Lee)  attending the conference, so if you are looking to meet up, please let us know.   Or if you just want to go out for a beer, we are a-ok with that as well.  Also, if you are a developer in the Chicagoland area, definitely get in touch with us.  We are looking for talented Cake developers.

We look forward to seeing everyone there, hearing some good talks, and hearing about what is up and coming for CakePHP and the community.

See you at CakeFest!

Lee Forkenbrock
Project Manager / Web Developer
Loadsys

Installation

To add FacebookAuth component to your project, please do the following:

1. Download the plugin code from http://github.com/loadsys/socnet and extract all the code into plugins/socnet.

2. Create an application with Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/developers/createapp.php. Set your Connect URL to <your URL>/socnet/facebook/connect.

3. Add the following configuration paramters (Configure::write):
Socnet.Facebook.enabled[0,1] - a flag to disable/enable Facebook support
Socnet.Facebook.api_key - application key (from Facebook)
Socnet.Facebook.app_secret - application secret (from Facebook)

Controller Requirements

Load FacebookAuth component where needed and specify actions that require facebook authentication:

class FacebookFriendsController extends AppControoler {
var $components = array('socnet.FacebookAuth');
var $helpers = array('socnet.Facebook');

function beforeFilter() {
parent::beforeFilter();
$this->FacebookAuth->requireLogin('index');
}

function index() {
...
}
}

Layout Requirements

Facebook helper provides all the methods needed to setup Facebook in your layout.

# Use <?php echo $facebook->htmlTag(); ?> to render the html tag. This function will setup all necessary namespaces.
# Include this line <?php echo $facebook->jsScript(); ?> somewhere in the body. This library is needed for rendering FBML scripts (ex. <fb:connect-button />).
# Add this line <script type=”text/javascript”><?php echo $facebook->jsInit(); ?></script> before </body> tag.

Please look at the sample layout file in views/layouts/facebook.ctp inside the provided plugin.

You can test the plugin integration by going to /socnet/facebook/friends. If everything is setup properly, you should get redirected to facebook for login and then see all your friends thumbs.

For quite a few of our projects, especially social applications, we had to add commenting.  In addition, we typically had to allow users to comment on everything (photos, posts, news, articles, etc…). Here is the solution we came up with that worked very well:
(more…)

• Built-in Pagination

• Sorting

• Content filtering

(more…)

We created this cakephp ajax helper so we could easily replace Scriptaculous with jQuery without changing the code and still have built-in functionality like pagination working properly.  The helper could still be improved, but we have decided to publicly release it so that CakePHP developers can utilize it for CakePHP Development.

(more…)

Having a background in Linux due to my past experience as a Sr. Oracle DBA in Linux environments, I became a Linux command line guru fast.  Using vim as a text editor is very powerful, but what would be even more powerful is being able to switch from file to file quickly and easily.  Below, I’m going to give a visual how-to on multi-tasking in a Unix Shell environment.

(more…)

(more…)

All of our projects use as much of standard CakePHP libraries as possible. That’s why all of our CakePHP projects use AuthComponent for authentication.

The first thing we needed to do to was to create ability to access ID of a currently logged in user anywhere in the application. This was achieved by overloading the core AuthComponent:

controllers/components/loadsys_auth.php

<?php

uses('controller/components/auth');

class LoadsysAuthComponent extends AuthComponent {

        function initialize(&$controller) {
                ClassRegistry::addObject('LoadsysAuthComponent', $this);
                parent::initialize($controller);
        }

}

class LoadsysAuth {

        function &getInstance() {
                static $instance = array();
                if (!$instance) {
                        $instance[0] =& ClassRegistry::getObject('LoadsysAuthComponent');
                }
                return $instance[0];
        }

        static function getUser() {
                $_this =& LoadsysAuth::getInstance();
                return $_this->user();
        }

        static function getUserId() {
                $_this =& LoadsysAuth::getInstance();
                $user = $_this->user();
                return Set::extract($user, 'User.id');
        }

        static function getUserGroupId() {
                $_this =& LoadsysAuth::getInstance();
                $user = $_this->user();
                return Set::extract($user, 'User.user_group_id');
        }
}
?>

This structure will allow us to access user ID and user group ID from anywhere in the application by calling LoadsysAuth::getUserId() and LoadsysAuth::getUserGroupId(). This could be applied to many situations.

Now we need to include the component in our project:

app_controller.php

class AppController extends Controller {
	...
	var $components = array('LoadsysAuth');

	...
}

In order to set the creator_id and modifier_id for, we will have to put it in the base class:

app_model.php

<?php

class AppModel extends Model {
        function beforeSave() {
                $exists = $this->exists();
                if ( !$exists && $this->hasField('creator_id') && empty($this->data[$this->alias]['creator_id']) ) {
                        $this->data[$this->alias]['creator_id'] = LoadsysAuth::getUserId();
                }
                if ( $this->hasField('modifier_id') && empty($this->data[$this->alias]['modifier_id']) ) {
                        $this->data[$this->alias]['modifier_id'] = LoadsysAuth::getUserId();
                }
                return true;
        }
}

?>

In your application models, if you need to override the beforeSave callback, make sure you call the parent function:

Example:

create table articles (
 id int unsigned not null auto_increment,
 title varchar(255) not null,
 article varchar(255) not null,
 created datetime,
 creator_id int unsigned,
 modified datetime,
 modifier_id int unsigned,
 primary key(id)
);

models/article.php

<?php

class Article extends AppModel {
	...

	function beforeSave() {
		...
		return parent::beforeSave();
	}

	...
}

?>

To start, I really think that many people don’t use SVN properly to organize their code.  I myself am one who was like this.  In the past, we only worked in Trunk.  Great, we had the ability to work on our own working copies of the repo, but beyond that, doing code pushes and managing larger revisions versus simple fixes/updates becomes hard.

(more…)

Since the ACL uses Binary Search Trees, a lot of complex queries take place with the left and right nodes.

So, let’s take a look at how one of the most intensive ACL queries acts with no changes made.

(more…)