CakePHP Auth Compontent Management

CakePHP 1.3’s Auth Component has made authentication and ACL much easier. It however, leaves most the implementation of user management to the developer. Here are some helpful lessons we have learned to make this process less painful.
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CakeFest 2010 Wrap

A quick run down of CakeFest 2010. It was great meeting a bunch of programmers and enthusiasts and finding out how they use CakePHP.

Here are my brief notes for the talks I attended and links to the presentations if I have them.

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Web Framework Battle or Convergence

framework-battle-royalThere is a lot of flame wars and debate over what web application framework is the best. At SXSW interactive there was a panel discussion amongst some of the developers and users of a range of different frameworks. It was a battle as to who was best at documentation, setup, templates, models, and optimization. In turns out the right framework has more to do with the solution you are targeting. Read more

MVC in any Application

I was reading in information week about Microsoft’s new MVC framework for .Net. What struck me was that I always associated model-view-controller frameworks with Microsoft. It is a roughly based on a design pattern that I used years ago in developing native Windows applications. It just makes life easier and it is nice to see that Microsoft is now providing it as part of .Net. So what is MVC and how can it be used in almost any application? Read more

Top 5 Web App Books

Unfortunately I don’t get much time to read, but when I do I like things that combine inspiration with action. Here are some great reads in relationship to Web Application developer or business in general. These have certainly shaped the way I approach application development and business.

  1. The Agile Manifesto
  2. Getting Real
  3. The Mythical Man Month
  4. The Cathedral & The Bazaar – Amazon or Online.
  5. The Pragmatic Programmer

Using MSSQL with PHP – Date Format Error

If you are running with the latest version of PHP & SQL Server on Windows. Make sure you control how dates are formatted especially for smalldatetime. If you let PHP use its built in function you could get strange results ranging from Chinese to French. Jui isn’t the same as Jul and that confuses strtotime().
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Social Media on Your Website

There is plenty of advice online and success stories about large corporations using social media. If you are like me and are a small business owner, you likely don’t have a team of 100+ employees to go through all of the social media channels and monitor, tweet, post, etc. You could hire a social media company to help you with this if you are promoting a consumer product or service. Then again you could spend an hour a week promoting your business yourself. Either way, what does this mean for your website?
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