Baking With Cake Php

Baking with CakePHP

a practical overview by

Valberg Lárusson

MyRecipes-Online.com

What is CakePHP?
A framework for building
PHP websites and applications.

What does that mean?
Its a bunch of PHP code which provides commonly used functionality so you don’t have to create it your self.

How does CakePHP do that?
Library like reusable code
Convention over configuration
MVC for structure
ORM(ish) for database mapping

How do I use it?
Download the code
Extract to your project folder
Create your
Database table
Model
Controller
View
(or just get started with CRUD scaffolding)

MVC
Model, database mapping
View, what the user sees
Controller, the business logic
http://book.cakephp.org/view/10/Understanding-Model-View-Controller >>

ORM
Cake PHP uses an Ruby on Rails like Active Record system to map models to objects
Not Cake’s strongest feature but pretty good
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-relational_mapping >>

The 15 minute Blog
Install CakePHP
Create the Database
Create the Model
Create the Controller
Create Views
>>

URL’s and SEO
Cake uses mod_rewrite to provide readable URL’s
www.domain.com/controller/action/param1
This is controlled via .htacess files
Can be turned off if .htacess is not read

Routing
Routing is a feature that maps URLs to controller actions.
You can use Route configurations to define how your website maps your web addresses
Example
Router::connect('/admin', array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'index', 'admin' => true));
Maps http://website.com/admin to the admin_index action in the pages controller

Components
Access Control Lists (Acl)
Authentication
Cookies
Email
Request Handling
(getClientIP(), getReferrer(), isMobile())
Security Component
Sessions
A wrapper for $_SESSION + added methods

Behaviours
Acl
integrate a model with your ACL system
Containable
Improvement on recursive finds
Translate
Table contains translations and the language is set in either the Model or Controller
Tree
Assists in maintaining the structure of the site

Helpers
Ajax
Cache
Form
Html
Javascript
Number