Jeff Loiselle

CakePHP VersionBehavior on CakeForge

jeff — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:57:03 +0000

I decided to move my VersionBehavior from my own repository to CakeForge. This will help the advancement of the project significantly. I can now create and respond to tickets, forums, and post documentation. Come on over, hack on my nasty code, and give me some feedback.

http://cakeforge.org/projects/version/

VersionBehavior Slides from CakeFest 2008

jeff — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 23:37:32 +0000

I finally made my presentational debut at CakeFest 2008. I spoke about my newest incantation of a CakePHP VersionBehavior. Here are the slides, let me know if you have any questions.

VersionBehavior.pdf

Happy Faces @ CakeFest 2008

jeff — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 06:31:05 +0000

A picture is worth a thousand words, and I’m too tired to write..

CakePHP ACL Management Plugin

jeff — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 12:25:29 +0000

Blessed be the ACL behavior which is based upon the Tree behavior in CakePHP. Those two things singlehandedly make CakePHP worth every cycle.

Ever since I got AuthComponent and Acl working in my latest CakePHP application, managing the ACLs has been a bitch. For a while the ACL shell was broken so I was actually writing the SQL manually to manage permissions. I know of course there’s a component that could have made it easier for me, but I didnt doing that was any faster for some reason. Nonetheless..

I decided to man up and create my first plugin, please welcome, the ACL management plugin. I know this has been done before, but I haven’t seen anything lately that works with CakePHP 1.2. Plus, I used AJAX to make working with trees easier and faster. This way I dont have to load the whole tree on startup.

Everyone is more than welcome to share in the fun.

Acl Plugin Demo

And of course you can always get the latest source from my own Subversion repository.

svn://newnewmedia.com/cakephp/plugins/acl

CakePHP Live Podcast

jeff — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 20:48:16 +0000

Over in CakePHP-land, we have to decided to storm the bandwaves with our humorous commentary and technical discussions. Come listen to me say “Awesome! Cool! and Great!” a lot. You can download our pilot broadcast or you can tune in on September 18, 2007 12:00PM EST and join us on Freenode #cakephp-live to ask questions that will be answered on the air.

Welcome To The Show.
http://live.cakephp.org

CakePHP Versioning/History Behavior

jeff — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 00:32:16 +0000

Strangely enough, every time Core CakePHP Developer Nate Abele and I were standing near a train, we somehow got talking about creating a versioning behavior for CakePHP. Today, I was taking a train back from Boston to Connecticut where I live, so I decided to draft up an implementation while I was taking the two hour scenic train ride; it’s only fitting!

Sometimes it’s useful to keep history of a database table. Once you track the history of a table, it is trivial to do diffs on the records, or even revert to a previous revision. Implementing this is usually a manual process for each table unless you’re clever enough to create your own magic system. But luckily, with the extensible magic of CakePHP, I was able to draft up a behavior that can easily be added to any table in my database. Voila! Automatic versioning, diffing, and undo for any table in my schema. I’m still finishing up the unit tests and adding some features, but I will post my work soon. Are you interested?

I Too Drink The Kool Aid

jeff — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 21:08:35 +0000

Sometimes as web developers, we caught up in the things we can do, rather than the things we should do. The same can be said about PHP developers who think writing TCP/IP stacks in pure PHP is fun. I though this post was dead on.

CakePHP Blog Tutorial For Oracle Users

jeff — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 21:48:59 +0000

William Graham was kind enough to modify the 15 Minute Blog Tutorial for CakePHP to cater to Oracle users. If you’re looking for a fast way to get started with CakePHP and Oracle, check out his blog.

CakePHP Subdirectory Trailing Slash Hack

jeff — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:39:59 +0000

If you’ve ever run CakePHP on Apache 1.3.x in a subdirectory, most likely you’ve come upon a “Bad Request” error when you failed to append the trailing slash on your subdirectory. Here’s a hack to solve your mod_rewrite woes:

Edit the .htaccess file in your subdirectory and add the line containing you_subdir_here. That should do it. You should only have to modify the base .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule your_subdir_here$ /your_subdir_here/ [L]
RewriteRule ^$ app/webroot/ [L]
RewriteRule (.*) app/webroot/$1 [L]

PHP Quebec 2007

jeff — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 15:34:24 +0000

Once again, PHP Quebec was awesome. Every time I attend this conference, not only do I learn more about PHP, but I learn more about the community at large, and humanity as a whole. Thats right I said it. This was my third year in attendance. I’m really happy that the same people continue to come, as I can continue a good tradition every year. I’m also quite excited that I get to meet new people every year as well. In retrospect, I really could not have had a better time. Now, I will continue with my analysis on the social human, technology geeks, and alcoholism. If you just came here for the pictures, they can be found here.

There’s some studying to be done in regards to getting excessively drunk with people whom you share interest. It creates a strong bond between people. Being that when most people are discussing matters, they tend only to talk about the past, present, or future. When all the talk about the present is exhausted, humans usually revert o discussing things they’ve already done with the people they’ve done it with. “Remember that time we went to get bagels at 3am and it was closed? That was so crazy!” You could even say that these initial relationships could turn into something more, like a life long friendship, or a profitable business relationship, or an estranged ex-buddy that fucked you up and stole your woman. But alas, I digress..

This year I attended “Oracle PHP Performance” by Christopher Jones, “Unicoding with PHP 6″ by Andrei Zmievski, and “An Introduction to PHP 5.2″ by Ilia Alshanetsky. I should have attended more, but it was also my birthday, and I partied a little to hard the night before. All three talks were amazing and each deserves its own review, so I won’t attempt it here.

Thursday night a bunch of us went to KcKibbins irish bar and partied down. At the stroke of midnight, my birthday went into full effect. My girlfriend Tracy got everyone up on the karaoke stage and everyone sang happy birthday to me. I was feeling quite tipsy and emotional, and I could have died right there I was so happy. It was truly the best birthday/present I have ever received. Thanks all. The next night we ate at this old New France style restaurant where everyone dresses up like they did 400 years ago or something. Someone defected and told the organizers it was my birthday, so I had to stand in front of everyone an recite some old french and drink a shot of whiskey. I was a little nervous being in the hot seat, but it was also quite cool.

Friday night we went Les Deux Pierrot, as always do, and watched the fronsh get down to lots of American Pop and Canadian Folk music. Most of the people from the previous night showed up along with the rest of the PHP Quebec gang. We had a blast and I’m sure we spent $1000 on pitchers or something. Craziness.

Special thanks to Yann Larrivee and crew for organizing the event, keeping it professional, and giving us plenty to do to kill the time with friends.

Peace out.