@TheKeyboard Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.

For those who might not look at the same obscure blogs that I do, I thought I should mention that the last few spaces for the first CakePHP Workshop in Raleigh, NC are filling up so if you want to learn CakePHP straight from the people who help to build it, this is your best bet. Sadly, I will not be in attendance. If they hold one closer to Toronto I’ll probably come out.

You know how sometimes you use a piece of software and you just don’t like the internals of it? Then you switch to something else that is cleaner, and looks bettter? And then it just unexpectedly stops working? That’s why I’m back on WordPress. The missing post I did will be back up later today.

I’m doing some server maintenance today, so the site might be up and down throughout the day.

While working on a consulting gig where I’m using CakePHP to rewrite an existing site, I was fooling around with the latest version of Cake from SVN and discovered a nifty little feature. Cake now has dynamic models.

I discovered this because my app was working, pulling data from the database but I hadn’t baked any models at all. After confirming with gwoo via IM that I was not going crazy, he told me what was going on.

By default now, Cake will automatically use the AppModel class and create a unique alias to a database table if it does not find the file. This means that if you have a table that follows the Cake conventions, needs no validation, and has no associations to other tables, you don’t even have to create the model file any more. Woah, talk about a serious time saver in some cases.

However, keep in mind that this feature *also* means that if you misspell the name of your model file, this dynamic model feature will mean that your misspelled model file will NOT get loaded, and you might be scratching your head as to why your associations don’t work and why validation is not going on. So pay close attention to the naming of your files to avoid confrontations with grumpy Canadian programmers on the mailing list.

With summer half over, I’ve realized that I’m just too damn busy during the summer. As a result, my blogging suffers. So, I’ve decided to turn things around and bit and ask my readers what they would like to see in the next month or so.

Using Mint I do get to see what visitors are looking at when they visit, and it’s a mixed bag. Which is good. Many of my tutorials and smaller posts have gotten lots of visits and lots of great feedback. Again, which is good. Feedback lets me know if I’m being clear in what I’m posting. But now I’ve sort of hit a lull and run out of topics. I’m sure nobody wants to read about my struggles at softball or the intricacies of politics in my job. You know, the boring non-technical stuff. Instead, I want to give YOU more of what YOU want.

In the comments, let me know what stuff you’d like to see. Follow-ups to existing tutorials, my thoughts on certain topics, explanations on other things I’ve blogged about. I’m sure that some of the existing content might be slightly out-of-date, so if there is enough call for revision I’d be glad to revisit things and give them an update spin.

As most of my commenters know, I do moderate every single comment that comes in and only dump the spam that gets through Akismet. Don’t be shy, let me know what sort of stuff you are looking for.