I’ve been playing around with CakePHP for the last several days. I’m beginning to enjoy using it through the CLI (Command Line Interface) tools that comes with the framework. Maybe because I spent too much time on the command line thanks to the CR-48 (Chrome OS) developer mode 
. Anyway, here are some tips I found while learning this easy to use PHP framework:
. Anyway, here are some tips I found while learning this easy to use PHP framework:- During the development, it’s a good practice to change the default value for CAKE_CORE_INCLUDE_PATH both in the index.php and test.php of webroot directory in case you forgot when deploy to the server. For example, I changed the value of this constant to $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . DS . ‘cakephp’ which is converted into localhost/cakephp. Once I deployed the application to the server, the included path will change to robbychen.com/cakephp without any modification.
- According to the 1.2 documentation, each database has its own form control and data type relationship. For example, the tinyint data type for MySQL generates the checkbox control, whereas the boolean data type for SQLite also generates the checkbox control. It also applies to the latest stable version of CakePHP 1.3.
- If you want additional database options, you can download datasources plugin. This plugin also contains sqlite3 which, for some reasons, haven’t included with the CakePHP core yet. If you’re going to use SQLite in the framework without this plugin or just specify sqlite in the database config file, it will use version 2 instead.
- This is probably a bug in CakePHP: The CakePHP console cannot find the sqlite database file unless it’s in the root of the application folder, whereas the CakePHP web application looks for the file in the webroot directory of the application folder. The database configuration cannot be simply changed to webroot/database.sqlite. If it changes to that value, the console could find it (webroot/database.sqlite) but the web application could not (webroot/webroot/database.sqlite). The solution I decided is to make a link at the root folder to link to the sqlite file in the webroot directory. This way could both benefit the console and web application. It however does not suitable for some of you who are working on both the localhost and the production server, or often change folder, since the link target cannot be edited. The link will break once the whole directory is moved to a different machine or the target file was renamed or moved.
- Type cake api [type] [method] in the command line to browse through the CakePHP documentation. It is a very helpful command for use as a reference. However, you may learn some new tricks through this command, or you could use this as the primary learning resource for CakePHP assume that you already knew this command before you learn something else. For example, I found something useful for my project in the Ajax API: cake api helper ajax
I hope these tips help you to become more productive with CakePHP. If you have any questions regarding the above tips, feel free to post them in the comment below.
