Leveraging existing technology is always a difficult task. It’s more of a personal challenge to get over the mindset that you can do it better. Perhaps you can, but do you have the time and budget to accomplish the daunting task of building a component that someone already has built for you?
There’s a lot of buts: it’s too slow, it’s not modular, it’s “fill in the blank” … Just get over it. Look for ways to extend the component for your application. Write a wrapper, build an interface, just get it to work.
Configuring CakePHP
I spent some time trying to figure out how to change the default templates. Resulting to grep for a few html tags, I found the “default.thtml” file in the /app/views/layout directory. Apparently I overlooked the obvious, because on the home page of your configuration, it tells you exactly that! Duh.
I copied over CSS, images and updated the default template and started getting that urge of “I can do it better.” I managed to overcome it quick by putting a bunch of “TODOs” in the template. I believe that there are a few ways to configure the helper functions or better yet, extend them to our application.
I still don’t understand the CakePHP architecture and the layers of the cake (pun intended). An architecture diagram would be very helpful at this point in time. This is probably the next thing in the list to do: see if one exists or start drawing one.
Cake Sheet is pretty good overview of the architecture and model/controller/view.
http://cakephp.org/files/cakesheet.pdf
Daniel, thanks for the info. I the Cake Sheet provides a good overview of the operations for each MCV. I was thinking more along the lines of a “stack” based diagram showing the layers of the Cake.
-Howard