The PHP Grind

Jonathan Snook’s Blog: View Caching in CakePHP 1.1.8

In his latest post, Jonathan Snook talks about the good and bad askects of a bit of functionality in the CakePHP framework - View Caching.

The view caching in CakePHP 1.1.8 is both good and bad. It’s good in that it can dramatically speed up the performance of your site - when you can use it. And that’s the downside. There are certain situations when it simply will not work as a practical option.

He talks about how it works and some of the limitations that it has (such as not being able to cache something not associated with the URL), and some people working on a solution. He also suggests two other solutions - (correct) url-based caching and cookie/session-based caching.

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Pierre-Alain Joye’s Blog: Zip-1.7.5 works even with broken path

For those using the Zip pecl pakcage, Pierre has a quick update you’ll need to download to resolve some pathing issues that were found.

A little release to help windows users to work with broken zip entries named like “a/b//c.txt”. PHP 5.1+ mkdir does not support such path on windows and simply refuses to create the base dir. The “”"bug”"” has been fixed in php 5.2 or earlier and a work around exists in zip itself for earlier versions.

You can grab this latest update directly from the project’s homepage.

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Pádraic Brady’s Blog: Extending the Mapper: Stars and Planets

Pádraic Brady is back today with another update on the game he’s working on and his latest addition - the stars and planets (”bodies”).

Planets and Stars (”Bodies”) form the central hub around which the majority of a player’s activity will center. This planning document addresses the generation and mapping of these entities, and not their individual contents, facilities or uses.

He breaks it down into a few steps:

• Laying a Foundation
• Adding Stars
• Skeleton Map_Star Interfaces
• Implementing the Map_Star Interfaces
• Position Random
• Generate Simple
• Conclusion

The end result is a system for positioning stars and providing all of the star’s data to the user.

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Joshua Eichorn’s Blog: Official WebThumb Contest rules published

Joshua Eichorn has posted the official contest rules for the WebThumb Contest announced a short while back.

The contest runs until November 30th, and the top 5 submitters will all win upgraded WebThumb accounts. The top submitter will also win a copy of my book, Understanding AJAX.

Since previously, all that was required was a comment on this blog entry, people who’ve posted there need to listen up - an official submission needs to be made. Check out this page for the complete rules and all of the information you need to include in the submission email.

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Felix Geisendorfer’s Blog: Two Tutorials - Title to Slug & Dependencies with If

Over on the ThinkingPHP blog today, there’s two new tutorials from Felix Geisendorfer - one dealing with the conversion of WordPress titles into the “slugs” the system uses, and the other the first article he shows a method how, inside the structure of CakePHP, to make a component to grab the slug out of the URL and parse it down to the different parts of the title.

In the second, Felix demonstrates how, with some simple if logic, you can simulate dependencies. His examples include a simple if to check for the return of “true” from various functions and an inline example of an svn export and FTP.

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