Cake Development Corporation

Mots de sagesse par Graham Weldon

• Working with a company that embraces open source

  November 16 2011 | Graham Weldon | CakeFest

    I've done my fair share of working for closed and "open" companies. I've recently (in July 2011) clocked over two years working here at the Cake Development Corporation, and while attending the Open Source Developers Conference (2011) in Canberra, I have had some time to reflect on my experiences with the company, and my feelings regarding my work here. Traditionally I have found that companies that claim to be pro-FOSS or open source companies are those that are making a profit, through the use of open source technologies. This is awesome. I love that the proliferation of open source software continues to grow and be adopted by traditionally closed, and proprietary software users. This produces better quality software for all of us. While CakeDC produces a large quantity of client projects that are closed source, what we do have control over is the common reusable components tha...

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• Tags Plugin release v1.1

  October 30 2010 | Graham Weldon | CakeFest

  Following the release an update for our Utils Plugin, we've compiled a few commits that have been finalised on the Tags plugin, bundled it and packaged for release. The tags plugin, if you've not used it, is a great and simple plugin that allows you to apply tags to any object in your existing application without modification of tables or structure. Its unobtrusive, and awesome. This latest update takes it to v1.1 with the following changes: Commit [79afb1d]: Update inline docs, and test behavior removal for #5 Commit [0d96881]: Renamed schema to work properly. Commit [982ff5b]: Minor readme update. Commit [edd0e8e]: updating readme Commit [db78a26]: update russian translation plural forms Commit [48c1a44]: Adding spanish translation Commit [3347464]: Added Portuguese translation Commit [f4c4e6b]: Adding german translation file Commit [44379a7]: Update license text. Comm...

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• Using the CakeDC Tags plugin for CakePHP

  October 29 2010 | Graham Weldon | CakeFest

  This is an introduction to using the CakeDC Tags plugin for CakePHP. I'll take you through a new project creation, and the addition of the Tags plugin to your project for use with tagging a Blog model on your project. You should be able to take the skills learnt here to any other project, and start taking advantage of the Tags plugin for tagging your models appropriately. Lets get started by baking a new project:   Follow the prompts to complete the baking operation. You will now have a "blog1" directory available. Change into that directory:   ensure that the `tmp` directory is writable:   Open up the `config/database.php.default` file in your favourite editor. Immediately choose to "Save as..." and save the file in the same location omitting the ".default" part of the filename. So save the file as `config/database.php`. Configure the options at the bottom to match the...

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• Utils Plugin release v1.1

  October 28 2010 | Graham Weldon | CakeFest

  The Utils plugin is our mixed bag of "awesome". If you've not yet checked it out, definitely hop over to github to check it out. It aggregates a lot of useful code and miscellaneous ideas into a single plugin thats portable and dead easy to use in your applications. Since its release in September, we've made a few changes and updates, and we've bundled a new version for release. Here's a summary of the commits: Commit [7bdf401]: Update license and readme. Commit [e7630bd]: Added tests for data retrieval and false return from model delete. Commit [8510fe4]: Updated documentation for Soft Delete tests. Commit [f7d9983]: Removed empty test file. Commit [c5db61b]: Changed the behavior saving the position manipulation without running model callbacks and validation by default. This is now also configureable by setting 'callbacks' and 'validate' in the behavior settings to true/fals...

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• CakeDC Plugins updates, October 2010

  October 28 2010 | Graham Weldon | CakeFest

  Its been a little while since we launched our plugins at CakeFest 2010 to the community, and a few things have been changed and updated in that time, so its time to throw out a new release for the community. We have received a huge response after opening our code to the community, and we're absolutely thrilled to know that you're taking advantage of the experience and effort that CakeDC has put into making these plugins. Getting feedback and hearing stories about usage makes it all worthwhile. The team has been monitoring tickets, and cleaning up where we can in-between "real work" :) Thanks to everyone that lodged tickets, submitted patches, we're overwhelmed with the generosity that people have shown by contributing to help benefit the community and to further the work we began. This blog marks the beginning of a run of updates we're doing with the plugins that have been released...

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• Feature rich, customizable comments plugin

  March 10 2010 | Graham Weldon | CakeFest

  Freshly baked by the friendly team here at CakeDC is the Comments plugin. For those of you too impatient to read on for a description, grab the goods here. And checkout the Sample Application. The comments plugin allows you to enable comments on any controller for any existing model in you application. Built in a manner to allow complete separation from your application, enabling and including the comments functionality is almost too easy. A good use case is the addition of comments to blog posts. In this case you can facilitate user feedback on information posted on your web site to further enhance the facilities of your existing application. The documentation takes you through a practical example of how you can include this into an existing application with only a couple of code lines. Checkout the documentation here.  

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• Felix Geisendörfer - Javascript and Git

  July 19 2009 | Graham Weldon | CakeFest

  Felix gave a demonstration of the production level javascript separation and management that the team at Debuggable use in order to minimise the amount of Javasript that needs to be sent to the client for any specific page view, and to ensure the logic is separated into the pages that it is used for. This creates a better management system for Javascript than using a single file. In addition to this separation, Felix gave an overview of common practices and operations for using Git for version control in a day to day environment. This included: merges, conflict resolution, fast forwarding branches, and managing multiple repositories. Largely this presentation was an interactive one, and to gain the most out of it, you really needed to be there.

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• Marius Wilms - The CakePHP Media Plugin

  July 18 2009 | Graham Weldon | CakeFest

  If Marius had more than an hour to talk about the Media Plugin, he most certainly would have taken it. To go over the features and functionality of the entire plugin would have been many hours as there is a lot there. A brief touch on the features provided by the plugin was discussed, with some examples. Requirements are in the high end, but considering the state of PHP and the upcoming version of CakePHP, developers should be moving forward in terms of their PHP version and library support anyway. The Media plugin requires CakePHP 1.2.x.x and PHP 5.2.0+. It enables the transfer, manipulation and embedding of files in many varied ways. You can find the media plugin at: http://github.com/davidpersson/media Marius' focus was on doing media manipulation and embedding "properly", and identified that while there are lots of user contributions floating around the net, none of them were m...

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• Robert Scherer - Multi-Tenancy in CakePHP

  July 18 2009 | Graham Weldon | CakeFest

  Robert's talk was unscheduled, but ended up being a great case study for an insurance sales white-labelling solution that his company had undertaken and completed. Robert talked about multi-tenancy, and what this means for a web application, and how it relates to SaaS architecture. Challenges to be solved included: Differences in functionality Workflow differences Separation and security of data Branding and visual differences Auth and Acl Components were used to solve a lot of the problems described, but in addition, Robert discussed the development of Modules as a new addon / plugin structure that allowed the addition, removal or configuration of application items at any level (Model, View or Controller). Configuration of the modules was broken up into system default, mandators, and dealers configuration, allowing for inheritance of options along the way. To solve the ...

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• Neil Crookes - Bake Master Class

  July 14 2009 | Graham Weldon | CakeFest

  After an introduction to bake, and what this shell means within CakePHP, Neil went on to explain and show examples of the code generation templates and capabilities provided by default. The bake shell is broken down into tasks and a main shell. These tasks separate out the logic required for various main task subsets including controller, model and view baking, amongst others. The main bake shell is found in the CakePHP directory cake/console/libs/bake.php. Tasks used by this shell are defined in the $tasks variable. Bake extends the CakeShell class and executes calls based on whether the users want interactive or non-interactive tasks through the __interactive() and bake() methods respectively. Neil made the suggestion that a persistent MySQL connection might be a good idea to stop database connection timeouts. Following this introduction, a great walkthrough of customisation of t...

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• Felix Geisendörfer - Recipies for successful CakePHP projects

  July 13 2009 | Graham Weldon | CakeFest

  Felix liked to Get Things Done™. And through experience and what became an interactive idea and experience sharing productivity session, he explained mechanisms and methods that he has used to achieve the best results for projects in the shortest time possible. Communication. While this means your team should be in contact, and that those contact points should be quality communication, it doesn't mean that instant communication is a requirement. Communication mechanisms would ideally be: decentralised and work in an offline capacity (at least for partial functionality). Return on investment is an interesting statistic to consider when responding to or creating a new item of communication. Provide a concise message. Enough to ensure the intention of the communication is clear, and ambiguity is reduced if not eliminated. Email is a great tool, especially for the following: Timezone di...

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• Joël Perras - Demystifying Webservices in CakePHP

  July 13 2009 | Graham Weldon | CakeFest

  Joël's presentation on Web Services and CakePHP identifies important and interesting points that really demystify both implementation of datasources, and what web services mean for developers trying to take advantages of their offerings. A Web Service is a defined interface. The interface is made known and public, however the implementation may not be known (and its not really important). The developer should be interested in the data supply and the data returned from the web service. Various mechanisms are available for communicating with a web service. Such as: RPC, SOA, REST and more. Much of this presentation covered best practices, better practices, and why people tend to make decisions like implementing components when they really want datasources, as well as implementing datasources, and going about the implementation the wrong way. In the case of web services datasources im...

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• Garret Woodworth - CakePHP then, now and tomorrow (Opening keynote)

  July 13 2009 | Graham Weldon | CakeFest

  Beginning with an overview of the CakePHP project, changes and evolution of direction and development team members, Garret provided a great overview of where the project stands, and how it has grown to be as successful as it has today. Garret gave a great description of the types of participation that are seen in open source teams, and these are relevant to CakePHP. He also described the attributes that make a good team member in such projects. Contribution Levels:   No effort (tickets are subimitted with little explanation) Some effort (well explain the ticket, and have attempted to reproduce the issue to confirm it) Attempted effort ("Some effort" with patch) Good Effort ("Some effort" with test case) Ultimate effort ("Some effort" with test case and patch) Good team member attributes: Communicate often. To keep people motivated and interested on working for / with ...

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