milesjohnson

This is something that everyone wants to do, but are afraid it breaks the MVC paradigm. Theoretically, the session should be a model, seeing as how it represents data and manages adds, edits, deletes, etc. Regardless, it's a much easier approach to use the session within the model directly, instead of having to pass it as an argument within each method call. Other developers who have attempted this task either try to import the SessionComponent or to use $_SESSION directly. This is the proper way to accomplish this. Continue reading...

Over a week ago I migrated one of my sites to a MediaTemple (ve) Server. I installed Nginx, PHP 5.3.2 (with Suhosin), MySQL, APC and Memcache. After a little configuration and debugging, everything was working smoothly except encrypted cookies. I was using my AutoLogin component and login never persisted, but regular cookies worked correctly. Continue reading...

I recently published a beta version of my feeds plugin for CakePHP. This plugin was previously the FeedAggregator component, but it made more sense to break it up into a datasource and model, and finally package as a plugin. The datasource is pretty straight forward as it accepts an array of URLs (RSS feeds), fetches each one through an HTTP request, parses the XML into an array, and then returns the result. The model is simply there for your convenience. Continue reading...

Over a year ago I wrote about turning debug off automatically in production. That post I wrote is completely wrong (to an extent). The theory is correct but the execution was incorrect. Even one of the comments pointed out the problem, but I haven't had time to blog about it till now. Continue reading...

While working on this app, I thought I would give the not so used method, setAction() a spin. If you are unfamiliar with setAction(), its a method that will internally forward one action to another. This is incredibly useful as it allows you to switch actions without having to do another HTTP request, nor having to reload all the controller and related objects; could be a huge saver on overhead. Continue reading...