Anno Domini on GitHub
By David Golding
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Anno Domini has needed some work, now that CakePHP has progressed since the last release, which was quite awhile ago. Since then I wrote the book, graduated from college, got back into college, reviewed another book (“Practical CakePHP Projects”), built two seriously amazing private applications, worked far into a third, and by far the most complicated app of my illustrious :) career, moved twice, and wrote five detailed academic papers. Busy, and my excuse for not revisiting AD for some time.
But, I recently decided to get the code out there in a format where any other developers that might want to contribute could actually get access. I tried subversion on CakeForge and really just screwed things up (I’m not the most experienced chap at svn…). But I’ve been doing a bunch in git recently, and decided to give GitHub a try. I’ll just say I’m hooked. And since the Cake dev team put together The Chaw which appears to be using git, or at least a git-svn bridge, I have hopes that CakeForge may someday include git for its SCM.
Anyway, I encourage you to checkout AD GitHub and fork it, tinker with it, and contribute if you can. If you’re wanting to see some Cake code in action, for those newbies out there, this is a great app to get your feet wet in. I’m pretty sure the changes I’ve made in the last little bit will ensure AD is at least compatible with RC3, so it should install now, but I haven’t yet updated the installation guide (PDF) to reflect some structural changes in the app, you’ll just have to experiment with it if you aren’t already familiar with typical Cake install procedures.
Well, it’s late, and I’ve got more writing to do before Monday at 9 :) Anyone know a thing or to about Derridean deconstruction technique and religious studies? Ah, well, hopefully the weekend won’t be too destroyed.
New Screencast: The Almighty $this
By David Golding
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So I’ve gotten feedback from a handful of beginning CakePHP’ers out there, and one of the most common concerns, or better said common things to get used to, is the
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object. Some folks look at
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and think it’s a variable and wonder what the heck is going on. It’s true, that it appears everywhere in a Cake application. I decided to make a screencast illustrating a little more clearly what the
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object can contain, depending on where you use it.
I wonder if it’s bound to be a little too abstract, though. We’ll just have to see. Do let me know what you think of it. I wanted to give it a try, going into something that’s foundational to one’s ability to work in Cake, but something a little less explained. Matter of fact, I did search around looking to see if anyone had done a tutorial on
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in CakePHP, and didn’t find anything that specific. So I can empathize with newbies who feel a little confused.
Anyhow, check it out, and let me know what you think and how I might improve the discussion.
Screencast: Setting Up CakePHP
By David Golding
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Check out my screencast [36 MB] on how to install and set up CakePHP to work on a localhost. For more screencasts, check out the Screencasts page.
