Let me share a quickie which will save you a few seconds if you’re using CakePHP under Windows environment. To activate CakePHP shell, you must be doing it ugly way which involves copying up full path of ‘app’ directory or cake’s console directory. To overcome this:

1. Create a new separate directory somewhere on your machine (say 3rdpartytools)
2. Create a batch file here called cake.bat with following contents:

   @echo off

   ..\cake\console\cake %*

3. Now, add this directory to your ‘Path’ variable (environment variable) from control panel.
4. Restart windows and you’re done.

Now to activate CakePHP shell, just open ‘cmd’ from working app directory and type your favorite command like ‘cake schema generate –f’ or anything. What happens behind the scene? Our own cake.bat is called after we issue a command, which then passes execution to console’s cake.bat.

Hope it saves you some time.

On Nov. 23, we launched our free online invoicing application called Invoice Dude and I finally have the time to write about it. Invoice Dude is a free invoicing application to help you bill your clients with ease without spending any money or any kind of leasing-fee. As we’re mostly into custom web development for the clients, we had the idea from almost an year - but it was only few weeks back when our team finally committed to this project.

Invoice Dude is currently under private beta phase (which means accounts are limited) and once we get out of it, we’re going to launch some add-ons. The add-ons list is not yet decided however we invite community once again to take part in it and vote for the most needed add-ons.

We plan to launch such similar projects in near future and look forward to the feedback of community. If you have any suggestions regarding the software, please tell us.