debuggable

Hey folks,

the final schedule for the upcoming CakePHP Conference - our beloved "CakeFest" - is announced! For those of you who don't know about the event yet, here is a little wrapup.

The next and third CakeFest will be held in Berlin, hometown of Debuggable! From July 9-12, people from all over Europe and the rest of the world will travel to Germany in order to celebrate and learn about the best PHP framework there is. Throughout the day you will learn a lot about:

• .. how you can tweek your application to run faster
• .. how to write cleaner code
• .. how to make your code ready for the real world
• .. how you can just become a better CakePHP developer

The evenings are packed with fun events .. dinner with the Core Team, going to bars, chatting about this and that and programming. And more.

You don't want to miss this event! :)

If you have not attended a CakeFest so far, here are some cool memories from the past:

• CakeFest #1 (Orlando)
• CakeFest #2 (Buenos Aires)
• Raleigh Workshop (Day 1, Day 2)

The event consists of two parts:

• July 9-10: CakePHP Workshop - (Lead by the CakePHP core team)
• July 11-12: CakePHP Conference - (Presented by the core team + community)

In order to check out the full schedule with the talks and their speakers, head on over to the official CakeFest site.

Hope to see you all there!

-- Tim Koschützki aka DarkAngelBGE

Hey there,

if you are looking for a fantastic full-time opportunity to write CakePHP code, check out this position with english360.com:

We’re a unique combination: an e-learning startup looking to shake things up through innovation, recently partnered with one of the oldest, most prestigious educational publishers in the world, Cambridge University Press.

Our flagship web application is now at version 1, and we are looking for a senior PHP developer with the desire and attitude to take the technology lead within English360. Have no fear of a poor code base: the initial application has been developed by the Cake Development Corporation, the frameworks largest contributors.

Now we are looking for you:

You’re a world-class PHP developer who has previous experience with CakePHP, or the ambition to pick it up from the folks who wrote it. You are a testing / Q&A fanatic, proficient in jQuery/HTML/CSS, and a SysAdmin wizard.

After a 6-month, full-time contractor role, you would take full responsibility for the technology side of the company, manage contractors, build your department, and collaborate with senior management on the future direction of our products. Ideally you would also be located in, or willing to relocate to either our New York City or Cambridge offices, after successful completion of your contract.

Interested? Contact e360jobs@gmail.com and impress them with a fantastic cover letter and a list of previous work!

-- Felix Geisendörfer aka the_undefined

Hey folks,

it's amazing how many people on the public CakePHP irc channel don't know what a test case is. This has to stop. To clear up some confusion, let's have a look at it.

What is a Test Case? A Possible Definition

This is what wikipedia has to say about a testcase:

A test case in software engineering is a set of conditions or variables under which a tester will determine whether an application or software system is working correctly or not. The mechanism for determining whether a software program or system has passed or failed such a test is known as a test oracle. In some settings, an oracle could be a requirement or use case, while in others it could be a heuristic. It may take many test cases to determine that a software program or system is functioning correctly. Test cases are often referred to as test scripts, particularly when written. Written test cases are usually collected into test suites.

So is this me testing stuff in my browser?

Yes and no. The definition does not necessarily imply that a testcase has anything to do with Unit Testing, or other testing approaches.

You testing your menu bar's javascript in several browsers in different resolutions can also be considered to be a testcase (or many for that matter) according to the definition. However, most of the time a testcase is meant to be a written test. When it comes to CakePHP, it's mainly a Unit Test.

Where can I learn about test cases?

There are a ton of resources on the web for tests. If you are looking for material for CakePHP, try out these:

1. The Article "Introduction to Unit Testing Part 1" written by yours truly
2. The CakePHP CookBook Chapter on Testing
3. Your First Testcase
4. Mark Story's Unit Testing Talk Slide for CakeFest Argentinia December 2009
5. My slides for the Unit Testing Talk for CakeFest Orlando February 2008

Lets get a discussion started to clear up confusion.

-- Tim Koschuetzki aka DarkAngelBGE

Hey folks,

if you are not familiar with Mariano's Sluggable Behavior, you should definitely check it out. It's a nice tool to generate SEO-friendly urls in your application. If you are anything like debuggable.com with our long urls, you might want to look at it. ;)

If you don't know what a url slug is:

A slug is a few words that describe a post or a page. Slugs are usually a URL friendly version of the post title, but a slug can be anything you like. Slugs are meant to be used with your site's urls as they help describe what the content at the URL is. They might or might not help your SEO ranking as well for the keywords in the slug/content.

Example post url: http://flashfun247.com/games/play/racing/tg-motocross-2.

The slug for that game content is "tg-motocross-2".

This blogpost deals with migrating an existing production table into using Mariano's sluggable behavior and thereby increasing SEO friendliness of your site.

Step 1: Back up the database table

Back up the table for which you want to add slugs. We cannot be blamed for any database damage this might cause.

Step 2: Modify your database

Add a "slug" field to the table. The default length that the behavior uses is 100 chars which should be enough in most cases. So VARCHAR(100) is what you need or the equivalent for your db driver.

Step 3: Add your $actsAs declaration

Add the proper call to $actsAs to the model that you want to migrate. Put in any existing behaviors that you need as well:

Make sure to set the overwrite option, as otherwise the behavior will refuse to overwrite the slug field the way we will do it. Also make sure to set the 'label' option if the table field that your slugs will depend on is not called 'title'.

For the full host of options, check the sluggable behavior.

Important: The field your slugs depend on (title, name or combinations) MUST NOT be empty for any row in your table. The shell takes this into account and provides you with an error log. To save you some headaches, make sure the fields are properly filled before you run the sluggish shell.

Step 4: Modify The Sluggable Behavior Code

You need to change the Sluggable behavior code on two occurances to make it work with the recent Cake releases.

1. Change Line 121 to:

2. Change Line 125 to:

This is simply changing the syntax for NOT and LIKE conditions.

Step 5: Download Debuggable's Sluggish Shell

Copy the following code to a 'sluggish.php' file in your vendors/shells folder. Just mouseover the code to see it in raw text.

The code is very simple. The shell takes a modelname and checks if your $actsAs declaration is properly set up. If it is, it finds all rows from the table and saves them right away, with the label field in the Model::set() call.
Since we have specified overwrite => true in the $actsAs declaration, the sluggable behavior now overwrites all slug fields in the table, giving you nice slugs.

Step 6: Run The Sluggish Shell

Run "cake sluggish ModelNameInCamelCase" in your terminal.

Step 7: Change your urls

The Sluggable behavior creates unique slugs. If two of your blogposts for example have the same title, the first one will have 'my-blogpost-title' as its slug and the second one will have 'my-blogpost-title-1'. Mariano's behavior attaches an integer to the slug depending on how often the slug was used already.

Now that you have unique slugs, you can change your controller code and view code to take account of this. If you are heavily indexed in google already, you might want to provide 301 (permanent) redirects for the old urls, or just offer both urls to access the same blogpost, but only use slugs throughout the app.

Enjoy! Post any feedback or help requests in the comments below.

-- Tim Koschuetzki aka DarkAngelBGE

Hey folks,

it's been a while since the last post here on Debuggable. However, this ends now and apart from this very post here we have something bigger brewing for you as well. So please stay tuned a little longer. :)

Anyways, on to some Caching fun.

The Motivation

1. When you work with large projects you can end up with a ton of cache files (models, db cache, etc.) as well as view caching files. When you try removing them with:

cd /app/tmp/cache/models && rm -f cake_*

and

cd /app/tmp/cache/views && rm -f *

.. you can end up with with the "argument list too long" error easily.

2. Also, executing two commands sucks - we are lazy after all. Now you could pull out some fancy bash fun to pipe file names. Have a look at this:

find . -type f | awk '!/empty/ {print "rm", $0}' | bash

The problem is, when you run this in /app/tmp it will not only remove cache files, but also files in /tmp/sessions, /tmp/logs and so on. If you ask me, the command is complex enough, so no need to add more funny stuff there to take this into account.

(For you peeps who want to see this, I bugged Felix to tell me: find . -type f | awk '!/empty$|^.\/logs|^.\/sessions/ {print "rm", $0}' | bash)

3. Once you are on windows, you do not have a powerful bash to your side.

I thought a simple call to a CakePHP shell can do the trick as well and doesn't force you to waste half a minute to remember and type in the proper bash command.

The Solution

The RemoveCache shell allows you to remove your cae cache files easily. It takes two parameter:

• A boolean to control if you want to remove standard cache files (models, db cache, etc.)
• A regex pattern to control which view cache files to remove

Here are some common usage scenarios:

Usage: cake remove_cache <std_cache_boolean> <pattern_to_match_viewcache_files>
Usage: cake remove_cache // removes all cache files
Usage: cake remove_cache 0 // removes only view cache files
Usage: cake remove_cache 0 home // removes only the view cache file for your homepage
Usage: cake remove_cache 0 articles_ // removes all view cache files for your articles controller
Usage: cake remove_cache 1 /letter_z$/ // removes all std cache files and view cache files ending with 'letter_z'

I did not put in a pattern for standard cache files, because most of the time you cannot remember your cache keys anyways and most of the time it doesn't harm if a cache file is invalidated to rebuilt the cache. If someone wants a pattern for that too, because they have long-taking queries, just comment and I will add it.

By default, the shell looks in your standard /app/tmp directory (plus subfolders) to find the cache files. If you have a shared Cake installation or any other fancy setup, please adjust the cache paths in the inititalize() method.

The Code

Enjoy! Feedback welcome.

-- Tim Koschuetzki aka DarkAngelBGE