Instant CakePHP Starter

Learn everything you need to develop a feature-rich CakePHP app, from installation to deployment

Overview

• Learn something new in an Instant! A short, fast, focused guide delivering immediate results.
• Focus on an iterative practical approach to learn the myriad features of CakePHP
• Learn about Models, Views, and Controllers as well as scaffolding, themes, behaviors, and routing
• Scaffold and generate your application code using the command-line “bake” tool almost exclusively

In Detail

CakePHP is an exciting tool focused on writing web applications in PHP in a simple and fast way that requires less code. You can rapidly build prototypes using code generation and scaffolding. It doesn't require any complicated XML or YAML files. You just need to set up your database and you're ready to bake!

Instant CakePHP Starter contains several tutorials that together build a powerful and engaging application, and in the process teaches you many features of CakePHP, both common and obscure. It is not simply a listing and explanation of features you could get from reading the online documentation. This book is an exploration of the experience of installing, building, and deploying a CakePHP application in a step by step way.

This book begins by installing CakePHP locally, and then deploying your application to production.

We move on by scaffolding our application using the wonderful command-line tool that is packaged with CakePHP, bake. With our code generated for us, we install a theme to instantly update the look of the app, iterating over it a few times to add URLs, an installable JavaScript component, and a JSON service.

We conclude with a discussion of the community. In short, Instant CakePHP Starter is a kick start to your experience with both CakePHP and its community.

What you will learn from this book

• Install the development version of CakePHP
• Deploy the development code to a live production server, using AppFog
• Use the command line "bake" tool to auto-generate Models, Views, and Controllers
• Set up a JSON service for JavaScript and other clients to consume
• Define your database schema in code and use the "cake" command line tool to generate and execute the SQL automatically
• Create and update themes, which are pluggable versions of the Views you know and love

Approach

Get to grips with a new technology, understand what it is and what it can do for you, and then get to work with the most important features and tasks.This book is a practical, step-by-step tutorial that teaches you about Models, Views, Controllers, scaffolding, themes, behaviors, and routing in CakePHP.

Who this book is written for

This book is for those who have experience in writing HTML/CSS, and a little bit of JavaScript and PHP, and want to learn the basics of CakePHP in an engaging manner.