18 Feb
Cooking Up Some Cake
Of all the people in the CakePHP community that I have come across, none suffers from a lack of respect more than John David Anderson, more commonly known as _psychic_ on IRC. Why do I say this? John heads the CakePHP documentation project, a thankless task that seems only to exist so unimaginative people can complain that there is no documentation for CakePHP. If I had a dollar for every person on the CakePHP mailing list who seems to either not understand how to use Google or how to look at someone else’s PHP code to figure out how something works, I could retire and blog full time.
But I digress. With a ton of help from Andy Dawson (AD7Six) the documentation for CakePHP 1.2 has moved forward immensely with the unveiling of the CakePHP Cookbook. It’s a combination of manual and wiki, where people can flesh out the manual and make comments on the methods in there. I have been quite harsh on people who have called for a CakePHP wiki in the past, because they tend to be a mess. This project is just different enough that I cannot stop recommending people to use the cookbook when searching for answers to their CakePHP problems. In fact, if you can contribute by moving entries over from the temporary documentation to the cookbook, _psychic_ will have one less thing to do.
From now on, whenever I find a solution to something in CakePHP I will not only post it here on my blog (because, after all, I am still an egomaniac) I will also create an entry in the Cookbook if it’s appropriate. Lucky for you, contributions are anonymous so you won’t be able to tell what I’ve put in there. My first contribution has been to get my documentation on the Auth component in there (although my simple user registration stuff isn’t in there), and Baz added his stuff he’s been doing with Auth as well.
So, no more excuses about lack of documentation! Anyone who registers and account can create entries in the manual, and everyone who complains about on the mailing list will be told to go look at the cookbook and contribute changes and comments to it.
Article Tags >> CakePHP || Cookbook
Posted by Jason Leveille on 18.02.08 at 10:15 am
I said it at cakefest and I’ll say it again. When I was first deciding between frameworks, I had read from many sources that cake’s documentation sucked. I chose cake anyway, and quickly realized that the best documentation cake has is the api and the code itself. Regardless, the efforts of _psychic_ and AD7Six have not gone unnoticed from where I’m sitting, and thanks to this post I’ve been reminded how I can contribute: I’ll start by moving over at least one entry by the end of the day.
Thanks for the post.
Posted by Tim Koschuetzki on 18.02.08 at 10:15 am
Thanks, Chris, one had to say that (about John). : ]
@Jason: Yeah, also some of the documentation people seem to underestimate are the core tests. Ever wondered what the Set class is supposed to do? Go look there.
Posted by Josh Crowder on 18.02.08 at 10:15 am
I’m still a newbie to cakePHP, and I have never really been one for manuals a good API is all thats needed, but with cake I found it a little different, probably because of the design pattern, now that the CookBook is out I check it everyday for resources and as I learn more I will start to contribute to the project theres still so much missing, but because of the way its set out everything can be covered! Although I would really like to see the Simple Auth up! I could really do with some help on that.
Josh