Dieter on the web

In the Cake community, there has always been much interest in authentication/authorization systems. The issue of authentication has been addressed in several add-ons provided by the community, such as DAuth (written by me), OthAuth (written by Crazylegs) and many others.

However, one of the additions to the 1.2 branch which is currently in active development , is a built-in auth module. A module that isn't finished yet but it sure is worth it looking at. (In fact I'm thinking about making a new dAuth version built on cake's own auth system.). As most bakers know, there is very little information about the 1.2 branch in general, and the auth component in specific. So what I will try to do, is delve in the code, mess with it, and explain my findings in this post. For this first post it will be more trying to decipher the source code, messing with it will probably for a little later on.

::Read more

At my new job, I'm writing a quite full-featured web application.
I've choosen to use CakePHP.
Why? Well, it may be 2 years since I last used it, but I've followed the project and it's planet, and it seems to have matured and gained even more monumentum.
I want to use something that is widely used so there is plenty of stuff available for it, it's RAD, it's flexible and powerful.
I noticed things such as CLI support and documentation have improved tremendously too.

However, I find that still, the recommended (or at least "most commonly used") practices are not as efficient as they could be, and that emphasis is placed on the wrong aspects.
See, even though the bake tool has come a long way since I last used it, it's still used to "generate some standard models/controllers/views" and the developer can take it from there [further editing the resulting files himself].
Finetuning generated code by editing the templates (in fact, only views have templates; the php code of models and controllers is hardcoded in the scripts that generate them), is still an obscure practice...
Also, there are very few commandline switches (Right now you can choose your app dir, whether you want to bake a model,controller or view, and it's name.)
All other things (validation rules, associatons, index/view/edit/add actions/views, which components, overwrite yes/no etc) are all handled interactively.
There are also some smaller enoyances such as when you specify one option like the name of the model, it assumes you don't want interactivity and produces a model containing nothing more then the class definition and the membervariable $name, which is usually worthless.
One thing that is pretty neat though, If you update $this->recursive in a model, the baked views will contain stuff for the associated things. But so much more could be done...


::Read more

Introduction

During the development of my thesis I wanted to create a drag 'n drop interface. But I never did anything like that, I never used CakePHP's Ajax helper and neither made I ever use of more advanced functionalities of Scriptaculous/Prototype. Hell I even never touched Ajax before this!

Although there are some basic CakePHP/Ajax tutorials out there, I still had a hard time because some knowledge about Ajax (in CakePHP) was assumed in all of those. After a lot of googling I even found a tutorial called CakePHP: Sortable AJAX Drag & Drops - The Basics
"Perfect!" I thought, until after staring at the article for a long while and I started to notice nowhere in the article "$ajax->drag", "$ajax->drop" or "$ajax->dropRemote" is used. (those are calls on the CakePHP Ajax helper to enhance objects to become draggable, or to become a dropbox where draggables can be dropped into). So the only more or less suited tutorial about drag 'n drop was actually about sorting and didn't use the drag/drop function calls at all. Even though it contains very useful information.

Long story short: I finally got it working (thanks to Krazylegz and kristofer and possibly others too, it has been a while so I may forget someone ;-), and learned a lot in the process. I will share what I learned with you guys so that hopefully it's a bit easier for you then what I had to go through.

You probably already heard of Google Analytics. It's a pretty nice program that (basically) gathers data about visits of your site and creates reports of it. It works by including some JavaScript code on your page, so that each page request triggers a call to the Analytics tracker sending along some data such as which page is requested and which resolution was used. (no personal or other privacy-sensitive data is sent). But here is the deal! I just discovered that you can also track events that don't require page requests!
Think of links to files or to external locations, JavaScript events (Ajax anyone?) or even Flash events (but who is crazy enough to use Flash anyway?).

::Read more

Finally, my own website...
I already wanted to get this up for a long time. My initial idea was writing (and styling) it all from scratch using the marvelous CakePHP framework along with an authentication system i wrote, dAuth.
However, due to my lack of time I decided to use the excellent drupal platform, of which I'm quite sure will get the job done equally well, while drastically liberating my time, so I can invest it in other projects :-)
Dries Buytaert's talk on fosdem this year really helped on making that decision ;-)

So, what will this site be about?

• me
• my interests
  • Free & Opensource software, and the thoughts/ideals behind it
  • PHP scripting/programming (I like C(++), bash and j2se too but I'm not as good at it as I am at php)
  • Audio recording/mixing/production
  • Drumming, one of my greatest hobbies
  • Music, bands, movies,... I like
  • productivity (TDD, automation scripts, shell/DE tweaks, ...)
  • ethics and philosophy, these aspects are really important in my life
  • Jeugdhuis SjaTOo, our local youth club

Now let's get started ;-)

I'm afraid the time has come to say goodbye to CakePHP, and to the projects I've been working on for it.
I still like Cake ... In fact, the further development of 1.2 goes the more I like it (well, generally spoken that is ... because there are some minor things I don't like but that's not important now). The truth of the matter is I like to develop, I like the php language and I enjoy working with Cake.
But .. all the sites I currently work on are all community sites or blogs, and although some of them have some specific requirements, in the end it's all very generic and a full blown content management system like Drupal proves much more useful and feature full then developing my own application in a web application framework such as Cake. (even if that's becoming easier and easier to do)

::Read more