This edition of Sharpening the Blades features articles about creating admin sections with CakePHP, how $(document).ready( ) can slow down your site, and the wonderful things CakePHP can do “automagically.” Hopefully these articles will help you sharpen your coding blades.
Chad, Creating an Admin Section with CakePHP
I have come across James blog just recently (about 2 months). The guys blog is great. He does so much with CakePHP that it is great to see what he is doing and what he can do. But the reason I suggest this specific post is because it seems to be the first stumbling block that every developer comes across while using CakePHP. This article specifically will explain how to get an Admin section set up and working. I consider this one of the must needed to know things to develop correctly in CakePHP.
Benjam, Don’t let Document Ready slow you down
Everybody wants to have a faster loading website, and I am certainly guilty of putting every DOM related jQuery snippet into the $(document).ready( ) function. This post showed me that this wasn’t absolutely necessary and gives good examples of when and how to break out of the document ready mentality.
Mac, The Dark Side of CakePHP’s Automagic
I’m not sure I like the title of this article so much as I like the article itself, but it does point out some useful information about the “automagic” things that CakePHP does for you. Some of the things they discuss are definitely features that were designed very wisely, even though the article seems to disagree with me on that. There are definitely some automagic things in Cake that they mention that drive me crazy too though, and I don’t really see the necessity for the seemingly poor decision made by Cake’s developers. My biggest peeve they mention are the behavior it has (or had, this may have been fixed/changed now) for many-to-many relationships (a.k.a. HABTM). It is really a pain in the neck when your relationship table has other data in it, like the date/time when the relationship was added, or by whom, or a quantity, etc.
