My preference is to add the PEAR library to the “vendors” folder and to modify the app_controller to have the PEAR path included through it.

if( file_exists(VENDORS.’Pear’)){
ini_set(‘include_path’, ini_get(‘include_path’) . PATH_SEPARATOR . PEAR);
}

Above solution suggested at CakePHP’s trac

Depending on the library that you want to get included in the programs, add the library to the respective view

App::import(‘vendor’, ‘XML_Feed_Parser’, array(‘file’ => ‘../vendors/pear/XML/Feed/Parser.php’));

Configure::write(‘debug’, 2);

Cause: CakePHP is not PHP 5.3 ready unlike the latest version of Zend framework.

Remedy: Try downloading older version of PHP – e.g. PHP 5.2.9

i) Setup cakephp by ensuring that there is no warning message in the index page after initial installation. (for this you need to change salt value in /app/config/core.php, enable /app/config/database.php)

ii) Create a database and a user for the database. After this apply the database configuration parameters to /app/config/database.php

If you are running the bake for the first time, it will ask you to create database configuration for the first time.

iii) Ensure that the path or the environment variable is set with access to PHP, MySQL executables

c:/> PATH or $ echo $PATH

Go to the directory where you have unzipped the cake php location on the server

c:\> cd web\cake\console

c:\web\cake\console> cake bake

This will ask you the location where the application needs to be baked and the database configuration settings. If you set the verbose mode, it will ask you to create

If you want to get a menu based display to bake Controller, Views, Models, Database configuration you need to go to the “app” folder from where you need to give the bake command.

Note: You can add c:\web\cake\console to the PATH environment variable to reduce your typing

Or else, you need to issue the command

c:\web\app> c:\web\cake\console\cake bake
inorder for you to start baking.

Some times you may get into fatal errors when you do a cake bake especially with the development version. Do not panic. Just download the stable version to try out the bake functionality.

root@myserver:/etc/apache2/conf.d# cat vhosts.conf
NameVirtualHost 192.168.1.100:80

<VirtualHost 192.168.1.100:80>
ServerName cakeapp
DocumentRoot /var/www/cakeapp
</VirtualHost>

(Note that there is no ending forward slash after /var/www/cakeapp. If there had been one, it might cause a problem if the /var/www/cakeapp/app/config/routes.php is not configured correctly indicating a never ending loop in resolving domain name)

root@myserver:/etc/apache2/conf.d# cat /var/www/cakeapp/.htaccess
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^$ app/webroot/ [L]
RewriteRule (.*) app/webroot/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

You can either write separate controllers and have each controller call a model based on table: users to validate each input field or use the same user model to carry out different validations which sounds logical.

It is easy to carry out different validations in a cakephp model by using the Multi-validatable Behavior by having different validation sets for different testing conditions.

Key things to note here …

i) Download the code for Multivalidatable Behavior and have it placed under /models/behaviors/ folder

ii) In the model where you want to have multi validation, you need to include multivalidatable behavior like
var $actsAs = array(“Multivalidatable”);

iii) Add validation rulesets array like
var $validationSets = array(‘login’ => array(‘name’=>array(‘rule’=>’alphanumeric’)),
‘changepassword’ => array(‘password’=>array(‘rule’=>’notEmpty’))
);

iv) In the controller where you want to apply the validation rule set, you need to add the respective validation like

function login(){
$this->User->setValidation(‘login’);
}

function changepassword(){
$this->User->setValidation(‘changepassword’);
}

For more info visit CakePHP Bakery

Grab a copy of cakePHP from cakephp.org website

You can either create the new cakephp website in the root (http://localhost/) or by adding it as a subfolder (http://localhost/mycakesite/)

If you create it as a subfolder, then configure the appropriate path settings for linking images in the web pages.

Open /app/config.php and make the following modifications
- Modify the security salt value
- to disable debug messages

Open /app/config/database.php.default and rename it to /app/config/database.php. If you wanted only one database, then make the necessary setting changes to default_database array by providing database name, host name, user name and password. And you can comment the variable declaration for the test database call if you it isn’t necessary.

The following steps may be of help to use if you are going to create MySQL database and configure a user with a password for that database:

$ mysql -uroot -p
Enter the password.

$ create database newdb;
$ grant all on newdb.* to ‘newdbuser’@localhost identified by ‘newdbuser_password’;

When programming in CakePHP or CodeIgniter or other MVC frameworks when you do not want to turn on the debugger routine and want to have a clean display of Array Data you can try adding a simple method in the Controller (appController in cakePHP) as follows

function testdata($passed_data_array){

    echo "<pre>";
    print_r($passed_data_array);
    echo "</pre>";

}

Usage of “pre” HTML tag preserves the spaces, line breaks and renders a neat display of array data.

You can also use var_dump instead of print_r depending on your need in the above method.

CakePHP’s wrapper method: pr(mixed $var) is the equivalent of the above method.

Try creating two files page1.ctp and page2.ctp and add those files under /app/views/pages folder.

page1.ctp

<h1>Page 1</h1>
<p>Static Content for page 1 goes here</p>

page2.ctp

<h1>Page 1</h1>
<p>Static Content for page 1 goes here</p>

Depending on certain conditions, if you want to determine the layouts navigation panels or display/hide certain layers in the layout, you can do this by copying the pages_controller.php from /cake/libs/controller/pages_controller.php to /app/controllers/ and then modify the display() method by checking the value of the passed parameters.

function display(){
......
......

$display_page = $this->params['pass'][0];
switch($display_page){
  case "page1":
        $this->layout('my_layout_1');
        break;
  case "page2":
        $this->layout('my_layout_2');
        break;
   .......
}
......
}

By copying the pages_controller.php to /app/controller/ directory you have the possibility to add some helpers through which you modify the output rendered to the static pages.

You can also handle it in the /app/app_controller.php (you need to move the app_controller.php file from /cake/libs/controller folder to /app/ folder).

• publishing the outcome of user action on the same page
• designing a single page to flash all success, error, warning, notice level messages
• designing a separate page for each message that gets published for the user

In CakePHP, to publish a message on the same page you need to make the following settings in the controller and view

In the controller
//app/controllers/posts_controller.php
<?php
function add(){
if ($this->Post->save($this->data)) {
$this->Session->setFlash(‘Your post has been saved.’);
$this->redirect(‘/posts’);
}
}
?>

In the view

//app/views/posts/add.ctp
<?php
if ($session->check(‘Message.flash’)){
$session->flash();
}
echo $content_for_layout;
?>

To design a single page to flash all success, error, warning, notice level messages follow the steps below

In the controller
//app/controllers/posts_controller.php
<?php
function add(){
if ($this->Post->save($this->data)) {
$this->Session->setFlash(‘Your post has been saved.’, ‘general’);
$this->redirect(‘/posts’);
}
} //end of add
?>

In the view

//app/views/layouts/general.ctp
<?php
echo “Message :: “.$content_for_layout;
?>

To design a separate page for each message, it is the same as the above step.But instead of one template file, you will have separate file layout file in /app/views/layout like error.ctp, warning.ctp, notice.ctp and custom design these pages to show the respective messages.

Parsing an XML feed can be done in simple steps as follows in CakePHP …

CakePHP Controller: /app/controllers/rss_controller.php

<?php
/**
*	CakePHP Controller to parse XML file
*/
class RssController extends AppController{
	var $name = "Rss";
	// As the RSS will not currently use a database
	var $uses = array();
	var $feed_url = "http://kurinchilamp.kurinchilion.com/feed";
	var $rss_item = array();

	function index(){
		App::import('Xml');
		$parsed_xml =& new XML($this->feed_url);
		// xml to array conversion
		$this->rss_item = $parsed_xml->toArray();
		$this->set('data', $this->rss_item['Rss']['Channel']['Item']);
	}
}
?>

CakePHP View: /app/views/rss/index.ctp

Feed Titles from kurinchilion.com

<?php
	foreach($data as $temp_item){
		echo "
".$temp_item['title']."

";
	}
?>