Software and Technology Ramblings » CakePHP

Calling CakePHP Code from Other PHP Code

Doug Hays — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 05:13:15 +0000

In order to call CakePHP from non-CakePHP code, we will copy index.php from /app/webroot and put it into our non-CakePHP codebase as cakephp.php.

Then, we’ll create a function requestCakePHP that requires the cakephp.php file:
function requestCakePHP($url)


{           
    // Set the url parameter for cakephp

    $_GET['url'] = $url;
    require_once 'cakephp.php';
    // Fire up CakePHP and buffer results

    ob_start();

    $Dispatcher= new Dispatcher ();

    $Dispatcher->dispatch($url);       
    return ob_get_clean();

} ?>

Then, whenever we need to call for some Cake, we just call requestCake with the URL minus the hostname:

echo requestCakePHP("/webpages/view/2");

In the example above, I have a webpages controller, a view action and am viewing webpage #2.

Installing CakePHP 1.2 in a Subdirectory

Doug Hays — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:02:56 +0000

I needed to test some CakePHP code on a client’s 1and1 server today, so I dropped my CakePHP app in a subdirectory (called agents2) on his site. But, after doing so, I kept getting “Class ‘Configure’ not found”. Luckily, I stumbled upon this blog post over at kushaura.com which saved me.

The core issue was with my root .htaccess file which needed to be changed to:

      RewriteEngine on
      RewriteBase    /agents2/

      RewriteRule    ^$ app/webroot/    [L]

      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
      RewriteRule (.*) app/webroot/$1 [L]

And that did the trick.

Thanks, Kushaura.com!

Announcing Dingus CMS

Doug Hays — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:20:35 +0000

We have written a very basic CMS system (just like everyone else has) that we use on a handful of our clients’ websites. We wanted a CMS system that was:

Easy to deploy
Simple to re-skin when provided an HTML/CSS design
Search Engine Friendly
Easy enough that non-technical people could administer the content of the site
Lightweight enough so that the system could be the foundation of a larger application or website
Built using CakePHP and MySQL

After looking around the web for 5 minutes, and not finding anything, we decided to build it ourselves. So, here it is, Dingus CMS.

In order to install and use Dingus CMS:

You’ll need a basic PHP/MySQL/Apache environment. (Note: PHP 5 is recommended and Apache needs mod_rewrite)
Download the source.
Extract the source into the document root of your website. Note that the app, cake, docs, etc… directories should be at the root of your site
Configure the database connection in app/config/database.php
Run the SQL in sql/dingus_cms_db_setup.sql
Go to http://localhost and you should be up and running!

Note that Dingus CMS comes with built-in search and site map pages available at http://localhost/search.html and http://localhost/site-map.html

Finally, you may be wondering what a Dingus is. You’ll have to stay tuned for a full explanation.