A potential client has asked me to look in to a MVC framework that I was pretty much told years ago to avoid. He justified his reasonings for being impressed with the technology, so I’m not here to argue something I don’t fully understand. Instead I aim to completely analyze the technology and blog about what can be done with it.
Cake PHP v1.3
I was easily able to find the open source MVC framework in the downloads section of www.CakePHP.org. Fairly small at less than 1.5mb. Using jZip for windows and FileZilla FTP I could easily create a new folder on my hosting server and drag and drop the files where I wanted them to be. About 700 files in total, once all had been uploaded the initial index page requested I set write permissions to a handful of folders, and modify 1 text file with customized encryption salt and database information. I was finished with the install in about 15 minutes and am now on to reading the documentation.
There seems to be 3 folders of high importance.
- app – for your custom applications only
- cake – to be unchanged
- vendors – for 3rd party libraries for your applications
More information about the app folder can be found here.
File and Classname Conventions:
In general, filenames are underscored while classnames (whether they are controller / component / model / behavior / view or helper classes) are CamelCased. So, component class named MyCustomComponent (first letter capitalized is optional) would be found in a file named my_custom_component.php . Each file would be located in or under the appropriate folder in your app folder.
Controller Conventions was a good read, I found difficult to paraphrase. If you are interested in learning more please read the documentation here.