I plan to keep my repo compatible to 1.x for now so don’t worry. I will keep an eye on Grahams port and try to incorporate any additions he may add in the future. I really liked the way he reuses debug values to adjust the core settings for example. Good stuff! When i have the time to work on the plugin again i will merge the two somehow (as a branch or something).

Enjoy!

TL;DR

• TwigView for CakePHP 1.x/2.x-dev • https://github.com/m3nt0r/cakephp-twig-view
• TwigView for CakePHP 2.x only • https://github.com/predominant/TwigView

Environment looks at the SERVER_NAME (or configurable conditions) and gives it a name and applies a defined set of core options. The method i am explaining uses this info to choose which database config to load, by adding some magic into Database::__construct.

A good practice is to create a file in config with all your environment configs.

// environments.php
App::import('Vendor', 'Environment');
// config
Environment::configure('development',
  array(
    'server' => 'localhost' //< if SERVER_NAME == 'localhost'
   ),
   array(
     'debug' => 2 //> Configure::write('debug', 2)
   )
);
Environment::configure('staging',
  array(
    'server' => 'dev.myapp.com' //< if SERVER_NAME == 'dev.myapp.com'
  ),
  array(
    'debug' => 1 //> Configure::write('debug', 1)
  )
);
Environment::configure('production',
  true, //< any other host is production
  array(
     'debug' => 0 //> Configure::write('debug', 0)
  )
);
// run
Environment::start();

To use this file when starting the app (visiting it in your browser) add it to the config/bootstrap.php

config('environments');

Now to the final part. The config/database.php

// database.php
class DATABASE_CONFIG {

  // This is the default, generate by bake

  var $default = array(
    'driver' => 'mysql',
    'persistent' => false,
    'host' => 'localhost',
    'login' => 'root',
    'password' => '',
    'database' => 'test',
    'encoding' => 'utf8'
  );

  // Add properties for each of our environments

  var $development = array(
    'login' => 'dev',
    'password' => 'dev-pw',
    'database' => 'myapp_development',
  );

  var $staging = array(
    'login' => 'staging',
    'password' => 'staging-pw',
    'database' => 'myapp_staging',
  );

  var $production = array(
    'login' => 'live',
    'password' => 'live-pw',
    'database' => 'myapp_live',
  );

  // Then add a __construct to this class to run some code when cake loads it

  function __construct() {

    // once Environment has decided where we at, it will write the name into Configure.
    if ($environment = Configure::read('Environment.name')) {

      // now i am gonna test if theres a property of the same name
      if (isset($this->{$environment})) {

        // if so, i then merge any options into $default.
        $this->default = array_merge($this->default, $this->{$environment});
      }
    }

    // if everything above went smooth, $this->default now has the correct login info.
    // Since we are using $default i dont need to change anything else in my app.
  }
}

Pretty neat, eh? If you want to check it out i’ve create a repo on GitHub where you can download/fork a working 1.3 example.

https://github.com/m3nt0r/cakephp-env-example

Enjoy!

CakePHP 2.x Support

This one is experimental. Using changes made by BigClick in his fork i’ve remodeled the methods to act as proxy and detect if 2.x is being used. So this feature is completely transparent and the plugin will work in 1.2+, 1.3x and 2.0-dev without any changes required. At least in my quick tests it did ;) Enjoy.

View Object

You can now access the view object within a template

{{ _view.action }}   //=> 'display'

Two new filter sets

‘basic’ und ‘number’ and as the name suggest are shortcuts to the NumberHelper (me) and basic.php (Hiroshi Hoaki)

Display the debug (pre+print_r) output

{{ user|debug }}

Display just the print_r output

{{ user|pr }}

Display the value from a environment variable

{{ 'HTTP_HOST'|env }}

Convert byte integer to a humand readable size

{{ '3535839525'|size }}    //=> 3.29 GB

Formats a number with a level of precision.

{{ '0.555'|p(2) }}    //=> 0.56

Display floating point value as currency value. USD, GBP and EUR only

{{ '5999'|curr }}         // default, $5,999.00
{{ '5999'|curr('GBP') }}  // £5,999.00
{{ '5999'|curr('EUR') }}  // €5.999,00 

Formats a number into a percentage string.

{{ '2.3'|pct }}    //=> 2.30%

Fancy Readme

I’ve added a decent readme with install and usage instructions.

https://github.com/m3nt0r/cakephp-twig-view

Due to a chain of unfortunate events the entire blog went down and i had to find a new host, dns and all that stuff. Also lost all my old posts in the process. :/

But i’m gonna try to restore them asap and start posting again.

At first it was awkward.. How to write loops, etc. Had to refer to the manual alot. But with all new technology you just need some time to get used to it. I wasn’t turned off cause views simply started to looked alot nicer than they usually do. All the variable, method calling crap is out of the way. Helps alot when building nicely structured XHTML.

Custom helpers, loops, conditions and elements work. I am also using it for different output formats like JSON and even emails. For emails i was really happy about a working {% trans %} block implementation (everything in between is passed to i18n).

{% trans %}
   Hello {{ username }}!

   This is my mail body and i can translate it in X languages now.
   We love it ... {{ someotherVar }}
{% endtrans %}

I think the most interesting aspect with custom view renderers is how you work with helpers. I decided to drop $this-> for readability sake. I never had problems with collisions in my apps, so why bother. You can access all helpers like you could pre-1.3.

{{ time.nice(user.created) }}

What you also can do is using the “helpers” that twig offers. There are some handy filters. Here’s a example with “date”

{{ user.created|date("m/d/Y") }}

My favorite is the “trans” filter. It will pass the value to __('', true). Such a time saver..

{{
 form.input('message', [
   'label': 'Your message'| trans,
   'error': [
     'notempty': 'Please enter a message'| trans
   ]
 ])
}}

These are just some examples, but the format will stay. Here’s a final example using a custom helper and a cake array.

{{
   gravatar.image(post.User.email, [
     'size': '30',
     'default': 'identicon'
   ])
 }}

As you can see, there is hardly anything you can’t do with the current implementation. Well.. except for one thing: embeded PHP. But who would want that with Twig, right?

The SQL Dump:

The original sql-dump element is 80% php code and that’s not very “twig”. Logic like that should be either in a helper, controller or model. But i don’t wanna discuss practices here. I guess for what it does it works. You prolly could write the sql_dump.ctp in twig somehow.. i was too scared. ;) For the said sql-dump i installed DebugKit which renders the log just as good.

About elements

What i forgot to mention was the element() command. I’ve implemented it as twig tag.

{% element 'some/element' %}

Bottom Line

Twig is fun to write views with. There’s a TextMate bundle available and a good documentation over at twig-project.org. Couple that with ZenCoding and writing views is so much faster =)

Extending is fun too! I’ve started to add some filters that route to cakephp helpers. The first one was “timeAgoInWords”. Shortened down to user.created|ago. Other possible candidates are the NumberHelper and most of the TimeHelper…. well. sky’s the limit and nothing stops you from using the default interface that i described above.

I think Twig and Cake is a powerful combination. And i haven’t even talked about Twigs own filter arsenal.
You can get the Plugin at GitHub. Feel free to play around with it. See the “examples” directory for all default layouts.

For those who don’t know what Twig is:
- Twig is a template language.
- http://www.twig-project.org

The good old default.ctp in Twig

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<html>
  <head>
	{{ html.charset() }}
	<title>{{ 'CakePHP: the rapid development php framework'|trans }}: {{ title_for_layout }}</title>
	{{ html.meta('icon') }}
	{{ html.css('cake.generic') }}
	{{ scripts_for_layout }}
  </head>
  <body>
	<div id="container">
		<div id="header">
			<h1>{{
				html.link('CakePHP: the rapid development php framework'|trans, 'http://cakephp.org')
			}}</h1>
		</div>
		<div id="content">
			{{ session.flash() }}{{ session.flash('auth') }}
			{{ content_for_layout }}
		</div>
		<div id="footer">
		{{
			html.image('cake.power.gif', [
				'alt': 'Powered by CakePHP'|trans,
				'url': 'http://cakephp.org'
			])
		}}
		</div>
	</div>
  </body>
</html>

Here’s my TwigView class

==UPDATED==
It's a repo now:
 > http://github.com/m3nt0r/cakephp-twig-view

There are also more examples and examples using FormHelper at github.

View the full gist: http://gist.github.com/589273

Some examples from the README, because code says more than a thousand words.. =)

// simple in and out

$this->User->lockAs('client');
$this->User->release('client');

// related to another model

$this->User->lockAs('admin_of', $this->Project);

// testing

$this->User->is('admin_of', $this->Project); // true
$this->User->isNot('admin_of', $this->Project); // false

// array support

$this->User->lockAs(array('admin', 'member', 'reporter'), $this->Project);

// and-testing

$this->User->is(array('member', 'reporter'), $this->Project); // true
$this->User->is(array('member', 'reporter', 'watcher'), $this->Project); // false
$this->User->is(array('member', 'reporter', 'admin'), $this->Project); // true

// clear everything

$this->User->free();

// commit a test

$this->User->is('watcher_of', $this->Project, true); // where 'true' means: Create
$this->User->isNot('watcher_of', $this->Project, true); // where 'true' means: Delete

That was the simple interface to setup roles.

Here is how it integrates Auth.

public $components = array(
  'Jailson.AclAuth' => array(
    'deny' => array('*'),
    'allow' => array(
       'index' => array('member'),
       'view' => array('member')
       'add' => array('admin')
       'edit' => array('admin')
    )
  )
);

You can even do this on AppController level. The Allow/Deny rules will inherit if the actions match. For more information have a look at the README.

http://github.com/m3nt0r/cakephp-jailson

Open for suggestions.
Leave a comment or two.

Most of you probably know the following piece of code from the default.ctp:

echo $html->link(
   $html->image('cake.power.gif', array(
       'alt'=> __("CakePHP...", true),
       'border'=>"0"
   )),
   'http://www.cakephp.org/',
   array('target' => '_blank'), null, false
);

This displays the small “CakePHP Power” badge with a link to the CakePHP website.

Much code for just a image surrounded with a link, eh?

The $html->image() method has a option called ‘url’ that basicly does the same thing. Only limitation is that you can’t pass attributes to the link tag. But it isn’t always needed. If that’s true in your case try the following.

The same thing, only without the clutter:

echo $html->image('cake.power.gif', array(
   'url' => 'http://www.cakephp.org',
   'alt' => __('CakePHP...', true),
   'border' => 0
));

There you have it. Of course ‘url’ accepts arrays and everything else you would expect since it passes the value straight to Helper::url().

Enjoy!

With this small modification in the AppHelper class you can do that in bootstrap using Configure, which also allows you to make the tags conditional if you want.. In short: flexibility, wee!

// The code:
class AppHelper extends Helper {
  function __construct() {
    if ($this->toString() == 'HtmlHelper') {
      $tags = Configure::read('HtmlHelper.tags');
      if (is_null($tags)) $tags = array();
         $this->tags = am($this->tags, $tags);
    }
  }
}

With this in place (file goes to app root and is called app_helper.php) you can now configure your tags whereever you like passing an array with sprintf templates, like so:

Configure::write('HtmlHelper.tags', array(
  'image' => '<img src="http://cdn.domain.com%s" %s/>',
));

yay!

Note: is_null checks if Configure value is set. This way you are not forced to set a empty array to your bootstrap.

It’s currently under heavy development, yet ready to use. I don’t think the interface will change much from here on out. The installation is similar to the DebugKit.

Put the “eventful” plugin into your plugins folder and add the Behavior or Component to your app. This will include all dependencies and the system is ready to use.

Only one thing is different from regular plugins. There is a seperate “events” folder which is a empty layout for the system and the place for your event listener classes.

The System is also plugin aware. If you want to enrich your base application with event handlers from plugins just copy the “events” folder layout into the plugin directory and prefix the class filenames with the plugin name. (just like app_controller).

# /app/plugins/pizza/events/controller/pizza_users_controller_events.php
class PizzaUsersControllerEvents extends AppControllerEvents {
    // your event handlers
}

I’ve created a (messy) README which goes on about how to use it, but basicly the workflow is:

1. add the component/behavior,
2. use the dispatch/dispatchEvent method in your actions/methods,
3. create or modify the event listener class and add a matching “on” method. 
4. go nuts.

// step 1
class UsersController extends AppController {
  var $components = array('Eventful.Event');
}

// step 2
class UsersController extends AppController {
  var $components = array('Eventful.Event');

  function logout() {
    // send a event called "UserLogout"
    $this->Event->dispatch('UserLogout', array(
      'auth' => $this->Auth->user()
    ));
    $this->Auth->logout();
  }
}

// step 3
 // File: /app/events/controller/users_controller_events.php
class UsersControllerEvents extends AppControllerEvents {

  // do something on "UserLogout";
  function onUserLogout() {
    $this->log('User logged out...');
  }
}

Unlike the original implementation the current triggers all handlers of the same name. So if you have a “UserLogout” event fired from UsersController::logout() action the dispatchEvent() method will trigger all possible candidates. Regardless in which listener class (f.e. UnrelatedControllerEvents) the event handler is defined. So in addition to the above. the following is executed too:

class MembersControllerEvents extends AppControllerEvents {

  // do something on "UserLogout"
  function onUserLogout($event) { // import $event data from call param
    if ($event->auth['isMember'])
        $this->log('Member '.$event->auth['name'].' logged out...');
  }
}

Enjoy! You can find it on github:
http://github.com/m3nt0r/eventful-cakephp