Hello fellow bakers!  Our team at Loadsys is proud to announce our sponsorship of the 2010 CakePHP CakeFest conference in our home town of Chicago, IL USA.  We are excited to both attend and contribute to the conference this year.  The last conference our team attended was in Orlando, FL in 2008 when CakePHP was still at a young age.  We cannot wait to see how much the conference and community has grown since that time.

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

We started working on Socnet plugin that will allow your cake apps to be easily integrated with most social network sites. For now, we coded and released FacebookAuth component, which will allows to specify which actions require facebook authentication and redirects to facebook for authentication.

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.