MainelyDesign.com Blog

Upgrading CakePHP Application to 1.3 (from 1.2)

Posted on 09/27/2010 at 09:33 pm | Viewed 2,724 times | 2 comments

I've been waiting to publish a completed article until after I was done with my upgrade to CakePHP 1.3.  Well, it's taking a while.  I'm not blaming the CakePHP upgrade from 1.2 to 1.3 for taking so long.  I'm actually doing several large-scale changes to my code base, my server and my repository structure.  Until that time, I'm going to publish some notes I've been making for this article.

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Getting All ACL Permissions in One Lookup (CakePHP 1.3)

Posted on 09/19/2010 at 11:36 am | Viewed 4,647 times | 1 comment

The biggest hurdle I've had to overcome migrating my CakePHP application from 1.2 to the much improved 1.3 branch involves Plugins and the ACL component.  A while back I noticed that my backend was kind of sluggish due to all of the ACL lookups (that happen with each request) so I optimized my ACL database tables.  At that same time, I also discovered an incredible mysql query that would lookup all of the ACL permissions for a particular ARO.  This setup worked great... until I started upgrading to CakePHP 1.3. 

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CakePHP 1.3 Improvements Over CakePHP 1.2

Posted on 09/09/2010 at 02:01 pm | Viewed 2,597 times | 0 comments

I've been working on upgrading my CakePHP application to cake version 1.3.  It's a lot of work.  I find myself constantly consulting the CakePHP manual/book for answers.  There are many places to look for all of the improvements that were rolled into CakePHP 1.3 (at least coming from the 1.2 version).  For my own reference, I'm creating a list of all of the manual pages that reference improvements, new features and/or different ways of doing things in CakePHP 1.3.

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CURL on Windows Doesn't Work in PHP 5.2.14 ISAPI

Posted on 09/07/2010 at 08:17 pm | Viewed 2,133 times | 0 comments

Just a quick post to let everyone know what I just found out- the version of CURL (php_curl.dll) that ships with PHP 5.2.14 for Windows ISAPI doesn't work!  That's right- it doesn't work.  I tried the MSI PHP installer package, manual installs, moving dll files into Windows and System32 directories all to no avail.  The culprit: a bad version of php_curl.dll (at least that's my best guess).  The other culprit: using ISAPI, but I don't have time to figure out FastCGI at this point.

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Upgrading Jquery UI Tabs and it Stopped Working

Posted on 12/09/2009 at 08:16 pm | Viewed 1,803 times | 1 comment

I was upgrading the version of Jquery UI that I use with Site Avenger.  The last time I was in a rush, nothing seemed to work and I rolled the changes back.  This time, I took the time and decided to finally make this Jquery UI upgrade happen.  This time everything went swell, except my Jquery UI tabs plugin stopped working.  WTF?

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Best Eclipse Feature: Link With Editor

Posted on 05/21/2009 at 09:43 am | Viewed 1,816 times | 0 comments

I use Eclipse for all of my CakePHP development work.  I love that you can get code completion, class inheritance, and more by following these steps.  I also loved that I could have 20 something files opened, and when I changed the active document in the editor, my PHP Explorer hierarchy would change in response. 

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Keep Old Settings When Upgrading Eclipse

Posted on 05/12/2009 at 01:02 pm | Viewed 1,603 times | 0 comments

I decided to upgrade my version of Eclipse to 3.4 (Ganymede) mainly so I could use the Git plugin.  I wanted to migrate my settings from one install to the other.  I know I had done this before, when I upgraded from 3.2 to 3.3, but forgot how.  So I don't have to scratch my head so much next time, here is how you can move your settings after you upgrade your version of Eclipse.

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A tale of caution: naming CakePHP "view" functions

Posted on 05/06/2009 at 05:13 pm | Viewed 3,112 times | 2 comments

Spoiler: functions that generate a view must be named using lower_case_with_underscores()

I just ran into a very interesting problem.  I was testing out some of my plugins to make sure they were still working with Cake version 1.2.2.8120.  They worked fine except for one function.  I had a form that updates a shopping cart, changing the quantities of products placed in the cart.  When I hit the submit button to change the quantities, I was getting redirected to my site root. 

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Preformatted Text in TinyMCE <pre></pre>

Posted on 04/21/2009 at 10:26 am | Viewed 5,841 times | 1 comment

Now that I've got my blog up and running, I've been playing around with syntax highlighting of source code.  I really appreciate sites that serve up code samples in a nice format, so I've tried to comply with my own version of this best practice.

Getting Geshi working, for syntax highlighting was one battle (I'll try and post what I came up with later). My real trouble came with using <pre></pre> tags for my code samples within TinyMCE.  I absolutely love TinyMCE! I did a lot of research on the best JavaScript-based WYSIWYG editor oh about 5 years ago, and decided on TinyMCE and never looked back.  I use it in all of my applications that require formatted HTML input (especially Site Avenger).  Every now and then I will look at another editor (I know 5 years is ancient by web standards) but I've never found an editor I like more.  Each editor has its quirks and I think the quirks within TinyMCE are the most manageable (as I tell my clients- even MS Word has quirks, you're just used to them).

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