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title: "Meet some Cake(PHP) bakers!"
content-type: article
timestamp: 1144767780
tags: "cakephp"
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<p>I should write more. I noticed that I since I decided to take a break from <a href="http:www.zzine.org">zZine Magazine</a> I more or less stopped writing &#8211; and started <em>baking</em> again with <a href="http://www.cakephp.org/">CakePHP</a>. As a result I finally recoded this website and <em>refreshed</em> a little bit my almost-rusty baking skills.</p>
<p style="float:left;"><img src="http://base--/img/pictures/cakephp.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>Why not taking advantage of this and write more about CakePHP then? After all, my last <a href="http://base--/articles/view/cakephp/">article</a> turned out well enough and some people even bookmarked it online on del.icio.us and ma.gnolia&#8230; Now it&#8217;s a bit out of date, I must admit: it was based on a pre-beta release of the framework, and we&#8217;re (more or less) stable now. <br />
A lot of things changed in the Bakers Community since then! At the time the <a href="http://wiki.cakephp.org/">wiki</a> barely started and there was no <a href="http://manual.cakephp.org/">manual</a> whatsoever, only my long and perhaps <em>slightly</em> boring article describing Cake&#8217;s functionalities. Now there things are much better for newcomers: they have a continuously growing community to rely upon, both on the Google user group and on <span class="caps">IRC</span> (#cakephp on FreeNode counted 63 members today, while back in the day 20 was a big number). There are also a few people who started blogging and starting websites about CakePHP: while I was the first to write an article about Cake I was <em>the last</em> so far to start a blog :/ Oh well, nobody&#8217;s perfect!</p>
<p>The first site I came across &#8211; although not a blog really &#8211; is Graham Bird&#8217;s <a href="http://grahambird.co.uk/cake/">Cake for Beginners</a>. When someone asks me some basic questions about CakePHP I send him there because first of all they&#8217;ll find a short <span class="caps">FAQ</span> about the framework, i.e. something everybody should know before even start thinking about learning Cake. Similarly, the guy has a <a href="http://grahambird.co.uk/cake/glossary/">Glossary</a> in progress to help those souls who feel lost in Cake&#8217;s terminology. If you don&#8217;t consider yourself a total beginner anymore, the <a href="http://grahambird.co.uk/cake/tutorials/">Tutorials</a> section can be a very interesting read: I wanted to add some <span class="caps">AJAX</span> bits to my site, but the documentation about this seemed pretty scarce, so I headed to the <a href="http://grahambird.co.uk/cake/tutorials/ajax.php">Ajax Task List</a> tutorial and it really helped.</p>
<p>On the blogs front, on the other hand, <a href="http://cakebaker.42dh.com/">Cake Baker</a> seems to be the most active: I&#8217;m starting to check this one often (OK, I&#8217;d better subscribe to the <span class="caps">RSS</span> feeds, perhaps) because it seems to be <span class="caps">THE</span> best place to get the latest news about everything concerning CakePHP: The author seems to post quite frequently (there&#8217;s always a new post every 1-3 days maximum) includes short code snippets when necessary and report news when there&#8217;s anything to report.</p>
<p><a href="http://sentino.wordpress.com/">Sentino</a> is also an interesting place to learn new things about CakePHP: the only problem is that the author seems to post less frequently&#8230; the blog seems to have some sort of &#8220;milestone&#8221; schedule, publishing something when there&#8217;s something big enough to justify a post. If you want to subscribe to a less frequent blog with only the essentials about Cake, this is a good choice.</p>
<p><a href="http://rossoft.wordpress.com/">RosSoft</a> unlike the others mentioned up to now has a much more technical approach: no news about Cake or anything, just some <span class="caps">REALLY</span> useful real-world example of Cake helpers, components etc. etc., with <span class="caps">FULL</span> source code to cut and paste. Really handy if you need something specific, truly excellent for beginners to have a look at how Cake classes should be written. <br />
Among the most interesting fully working snippets:<br />
<a href="http://rossoft.wordpress.com/2006/03/29/ip-to-country-component-geo-location/">IP-to-country component</a> <br />
<a href="http://rossoft.wordpress.com/2006/03/27/poor-mans-cron-component/">Poor man&#8217;s cron component</a><br />
<a href="http://rossoft.wordpress.com/2006/03/16/image-auth-component/">Image Auth &#8211; <span class="caps">CAPTCHA</span> component</a></p>
<p style="float:right;"><img src="http://xcite-online.de/spliceit/themes/SpliceIt/logo.png" alt="" /></p>
<p><a href="http://www.thinkingphp.org/">ThinkingPHP</a> is another &#8220;technical&#8221; Cake blog, with interesting code snippets and thoughts about our favourite <span class="caps">PHP</span> framework. For those who don&#8217;t know or don&#8217;t remember him (yes, like me&#8230;), he&#8217;s the author of <a href="http://xcite-online.de/spliceit/">SpliceIt!</a>&#8230; what?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>SpliceIt!&#8217;s mission is to provide a clean and light-weight code base for people who want to create complex webapps faster then ever. The things we want to provide are:<br />
    &#8211; User/Right Managment<br />
    &#8211; Theming Support<br />
    &#8211; i18n<br />
    &#8211; Url Aliasing<br />
    &#8211; and most notabily: Modularization of often used Code Segments</p>
</blockquote>
<p>i.e. something I should have checked before recoding this website. I&#8217;ll definitely keep this in mind for the next release of h3rald.com.</p>
<p style="float:left;"><img src="http://rdos.rd11.com/img/rd11/rdlogo.gif" alt="" /></p>
<p><a href="http://rd11.com/posts">Posts@ rd11</a> a.k.a. gwoo [and seth]&#8216;s blog. Moment of silence. Gwoo is CakePHP&#8217;s project manager (respect+) and one of the lead developers of CakePHP and he also actually uses Cake for his website and blog instead of WordPress :)<br />
What can I write about him. It&#8217;s difficult. I&#8217;ll avoid all possible pseudo-religious comparisons but when I say that <em>he created CakePHP</em> I think I say it all. The code he used for his blog is part of a collection of open-source, Cake-powered tools all prefixed with rd- or Cake, available on <a href="https://cakeforge.org/projects/rdos">CakeForge</a>. I personally think that looking at his sample applications can be one of the best way to learn how to bake <em>properly</em>, and yes, I <strong>did</strong> check them out before coding this site for the second time. Demos are <a href="http://rdos.rd11.com/">online</a>.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s it. These are perhaps the most well-known bakers and/or Cake bloggers on the planet. There are certainly others, maybe even in other languages, but now I&#8217;d better stop writing now, because this is a rather long blog post. Sorry. I&#8217;m new to blogging and I just can&#8217;t help myself: especially with Cake, I need to write lenghty texts!<br />
More to come&#8230;</p>