Last week i was in the #CakePHP channel on irc.freenode.net when i noticed a discussion about someone who had created a component, but didn’t want it posted on the bakery. He thought that his code wasn’t up to par with everything else on the bakery. So he thought about posting it on his blog.

I can see why he didn’t want to post it on the bakery. You can get a lot of critics there, but those are only there to help improve the thing you posted and can help you to write better code.

It got me thinking how scattered the information about Cake really is. There is, of course, the bakery, but there are also the saved bookmarks on del.icio.us, the custom search engine, the superfeed and a gazillion blog posts about cake. All containing really good components, helpers and tutorials.

But what i really want is a central hub for all of these great contributions to Cake. Right now i’m feeling that i only get to see a part of all that’s good about cake and still miss out on a lot of good stuff. Shure if i need something i google it first before i create it myself, but there must be a better way to stay up-to-date about all that is cake.

The bakery is a good start, but there are a lot of people who don’t want to post their stuff there, because they think it isn’t good enough and there is a list on the CakePHP home page, but it only lists a few blogs and there are so much more.

I think it would help the community as a whole and give more attention to all the great CakePHP stuff out there.

What do you think? Does CakePHP need a central place for all stuff cake, or do you think it’s fine the way it is. Or maybe you have a great idea to get people to post more of their content to the bakery?
Let me know in the comments!

Tim Koschützki of Debuggable Ltd. explains how to bend the find() method to your own needs. In the comments there are also two links to other posts about this subject, namely to: Daniel Hofstetter (CakeBaker) - Defining custom find types and Nate Abele (on C7Y) with Best Practices in MVC Design with CakePHP

Peter Butler from Studio Canaria created a CakePHP Currency Conversion Component that updates right from the internet. This way it’s always up-to-date with the latest currency conversion rates.

Teknoid as a nice post about form security on his blog: nuts and bolts of cakephp

And last but definitely not least: Cake 1.2 RC2 has been released!! See the post in the Bakery

That’s it for this week. Next week i’ll be in France relaxing at the coast, so no update then ;)

Happy Baking!

So what happened in the wonderful world of CakePHP this week?

Well the Bakery seems to have a bit more action going on the last few weeks. Some new articles appeared this week like Acts As Censored by jon bennett and how to add a trailing slash to CakePHP by Marc Grabanski.

Not only the bakery had new articles but also Mr Daniel Hofstetter (CakeBaker) found a new approach for static pages. I think it’s a cleaner approach then to abuse the error handler and it keeps the CakePHP directory/file structure intact.

Chris Hartjes from @theKeyboard writes about the fact that it’s really easy to make CakePHP iPhone compatible in CakePHP and the iPhone

And last but certainly not least the busy blogging guys of Debuggable have written two articles on Cake, namely How To Execute Only Specific Test Methods in CakePHP Unit Tests by Tim Koschützki and How to Group By in CakePHP’s new release Part 2 also by Tim. Both are very well written articles and i like the fact that they use a lot of example code. I like to think that example code gives a much better understanding of the concept, but readers should also be aware that it isn’t copy/paste material and only serves as an example of the concept, not to slap it in your own code and have it work like magic.

Well that’s it for this week. If i missed something that happened or you have your own blog about CakePHP, let me know and i’ll add it to this post!