First add the following functions to your template.php file.

function phptemplate_preprocess_page(&$vars) {
    $vars['tertiary_links'] = menu_tertiary_links();
}

/**
 * Returns an array containing the tertiary links based on the primary menu.
 * Tertiary links can be either a third level of the Primary links
 * menu or generated from a second level of the explicitly defined secondary_menu
 */
function menu_tertiary_links() {
    if (variable_get('menu_secondary_links_source', 'secondary-links') == variable_get('menu_primary_links_source', 'primary-links')) {
    return menu_navigation_links(variable_get('menu_primary_links_source', 'primary-links'), 2);
  }
  else {
    return menu_navigation_links(variable_get('menu_secondary_links_source', 'secondary-links'), 3);
  }
}

Once you’ve done that, you can add this snippet in your template.

<?php if (isset($tertiary_links)): ?>
    <?php print theme('links', $tertiary_links, array('class' => 'links tertiary-links')); ?>
<?php endif; ?>

And voila! you’re done.

$.fn.fixed = function() {
    return this.each(function() {
        var header = $(this);
        var offset = header.offset();
        var floater = $('<div></div>').append(header.clone(true));
        floater.hide().appendTo(document.body).addClass('floating-toolbar');

        $(window).scroll(function() {
            var s = $(this).scrollTop();

            if (s > offset.top) {
                header.css('visibility', 'hidden');
                floater.show();
            } else {
                floater.hide();
                header.css('visibility', 'visible');
            }
        });
    });
};

And here’s some css to make it work.

.floating-toolbar {
    position: fixed;
    top: 0;
    left: 0;
    width: 100%;
    opacity: 0.85;
}

The first thing I noticed were the cake’s printed on the cover, they don’t look really tasty to me because of the odd colors. Thankfully the inside of the book looked much better.

The overall structure of the book is good and makes sense. The writing style is easy and pleasant to read, therefor all the grammar and punctuation mistakes didn’t bother me at all. The indentation of the code blocks isn’t always consistent, but it’s not really annoying.

I really like how the chapters are divided in ‘Time for action’ and ‘What just happened’. You start building working applications right away, after you’re done there’s a clear explanation of what you just build. Perfect for a practical person like me.

Unfortunately there are quite a few times where the writer is making assumptions or is giving advise, but is not explaining why it’s good to do this or that. For example page 27:

We then defined a variable named $name in the Task’model, and assigned the name of the model to it. This is not mandatory, as Cake can figure out the name of the model automatically. But it is a good practice to name it manually.

People like me want to know why it is a good practice to name it manually…

The book is clearly written for developers which are new to CakePHP, but being new to Cake and being retarded are 2 very different things. Why bother writing almost 4 pages for downloading CakePHP alone?

Because this book was written for the beta version of Cake, there are quite a few things that work differently now with the final release. I’m not going deeper into this because other bloggers already did this for me ;)

Some code examples contain bad practice PHP code, write good example code for the readers so they don’t learn bad practices. One example is the remember me functionality of the Quickwall application where both username and password are saved in a cookie.

All in all, I would recommend this book to everyone who’s new to CakePHP because it’s a really good startup. I do hope there will be released a new revision soon to fix all the grammar and deprecated example code.

Fortunately GIT has a very easy solution for this, just run the following command on the file or path you want to ignore the changes of:

git update-index --assume-unchanged <file>

If you wanna start tracking changes again run the following command:

git update-index --no-assume-unchanged <file>

You can find more info about this in the git manual.

Happy GITting ;)

I’ve published my SOAP Datasource on Github, you can find the sourcecode in the ‘soapsource‘ repository.

SoapSource allows you to connect with SOAP servers that support Wsdl. I also started implementing functionality for non Wsdl SOAP servers, but I don’t think I will continue on this.
SoapSource now supports non wsdl servers also, you can add ‘uri’ and ‘location’ parameters to your datasource configuration now.

In order to use the Datasource you will need to have PHP5 installed with the SOAP extension.

Here’s how you use it:

Copy the soap_source.php file to your app/models/datasources/ directory

Add a configuration to your database.php in app/config/

var $soap = array(
‘datasource’ => ‘soap’,
‘wsdl’ => ‘http://localhost/soapservice.wsdl’, // wsdl mode
‘location’ => ”, // Required for non wsdl mode
‘uri’ => ” // Required for non wsdl mode
);

Then in your model set:

var $useDbConfig = ‘soap’;

var $useTable = false;

And you’re ready to go.

In your controller you can now use

$this->Model->query(‘SoapMethod’, array(‘mySoapParams’));

or

$this->Model->SoapMethod(array(‘mySoapParams’));

But then I found out you can compile dynamic extensions without recompiling your entire PHP installation. So I got SOAP running within 5 minutes using to following instructions:

Download the PHP source of the version your Mac is running, probably PHP-5.2.6, and extract the package.

cd /tmp

curl -O http://de3.php.net/distributions/php-5.2.6.tar.bz2

tar xjf php-5.2.6.tar.bz2

Then move to the expanded directory and execute the following commands.

cd php-5.2.6/

export LIBTOOLIZE=glibtoolize MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5

cd ext/soap

phpize

Now we need to compile and install the extension.

MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5 CFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe -no-cpp-precomp" CCFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe" CXXFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe" LDFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -bind_at_load" ./configure

make

sudo make install

Now the extension has been compiled and installed, but you’ll probably need to do some more configuration before it will work.

Edit your php.ini, which is located in /private/etc/php.ini
Change the ‘extension_dir’ to ‘/usr/lib/php/extensions’ and enable the extension by adding this line ‘extension=soap.so’

Create a symbolic link to the soap extension

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/soap.so /usr/lib/php/extensions/soap.so

And finally restart apache for the changes to take effect

sudo apachectl restart

That’s it! you can now use the SOAP extensions.
Please let me know if you have any comments or problems with this.

Router::connect('/manager/:controller/:action/*', array('prefix' => 'manager', 'manager' => true));

Links
Creating links to your prefixed actions is easy

echo $html->link('Edit user', array('controller' => 'users', 'action' => 'edit', 'manager' => true, 1));

This will create a link to : ‘/manager/users/edit/1′

Pagination
When using pagination in your prefixed actions, you’ll notice the paginator helper doesn’t output the correct url’s by default. Here’s how to fix it:

$paginator->options(array('url' => array('manager' => true)));

Forms
The form helper doesn’t detect the prefix automatically also.. here’s how to solve it

echo $form->create('User', array('url' => $html->url(array('pb' => true, $this->data['User']['id']))));

Unfortunately the Router class doesn’t detect the prefixes automatically, like it does with admin routes. Which results in a lot of extra code and work when you decide to use prefixes. Hopefully this will be changed in later releases.

The repository also has been renamed, get your clone at ‘git://github.com/Pagebakers/navigationhelper.git’.

Have fun

I just released my MenuHelper for CakePHP. It’s a really simple class, but it saves time.
It allows you to generate menu’s and single links, if a link is currently active it adds an ‘active’ class.

Usage:
Copy menu.php to your helpers directory, and enable the helper by adding it to the $helpers array.

Then in your view you can do things like this:

// Echo a list with links
echo $menu->menu(array(
    array('Home', array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'display', 'home')),
    array('Another link to home', '/', array('class' => 'another-link-to-home'))
), array('id' => 'my-menu'));

// Or a single link
echo $menu->link('Home', '/');

You can find the source on GitHub:

http://github.com/Pagebakers/menuhelper/tree/master/

Have fun with it.