This is the second article in the series on creating a full DVD Catalog online web application with CakePHP 1.2. Last time I went through the process of beginning a new application from scratch. I created a small brief which led to quite a few requirements that the application will need to do and from those requirements I came up with a database structure that should hold up throughout the project life cycle. Finally I sent up CakePHP on my local computer using Xampp with a Virtual Host and created the Model files for the application. If you have not yet read the first article then please go back and have a quick look so you (hopefully) know what I'm talking about.
In this article I'm going to focus on the Formats table of the application and this includes creating a controller to deal with the functionality that the application will offer such as adding, editing and deleting formats. As well as the controller I'm going to create the related views for all the Format actions and at the end of the article we will be able to start adding data to the application.
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This is the first article in a series that I will use to document the process of creating a fully featured web application in CakePHP. At the moment the whole series comes in at around 8 articles but I'm sure this will grow as I write up each one. My aim is to publish one article a week detailing the steps involved with setting up and coding a full working online DVD Catalog Application that will keep track of all my DVDs. I've been meaning to create such an application for a long time so I thought it would be a great project to put on my website.
In this first article I'm going to go through the steps of setting up your new CakePHP project, go through the requirements of the system, create the database structure and finally setup the Model's and associations. For this project I'm going to be using the newest 1.2 version of CakePHP, I haven't used it before so this will be a learning process for me as well.
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This is a quick little tip that I've been using on my most recent projects to significantly reduce the size of Javascript code. This comes in handy when using frameworks and although jQuery (my framework of choice) is quite small to begin some libraries like Prototype combined with script.aculo.us come in at quite a large file size.
Using this small modification I reduced the size of jQuery along with my own Javascript code from 55kb to around 16kb with one less trip to the server. All of the compression is done on the server side using PHP so if a visitor's browser does not support G-Zip then they will just receive the original uncompressed files.
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This is my first article about the wonderful jQuery Javascript library, its been my library of choice for around a year and it's ideal for web development because of it's small size and powerful selector methods.
I'm going to go through the process of creating an expandable/collapsible navigation menu that has a series of top level links with each having a number of sub links. When a top level link is clicked the menu expands and shows the related sub links. An example of which is shown below:
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For the past few weeks i have been working with the CodeIgniter framework for a large scale project at work, the system is a project management application that allows different levels of users to login and track projects that belong to them. My first experience of a PHP framework was the wonderful CakePHP and my exposure to that MVC framework helped me greatly when using CodeIgniter. In this article I'm going to go through a few pro's and con's of CodeIgniter coming entirely from a perspective of a CakePHP user.
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