The day I learned CakePHP, it started inspiring me for getting more and more out of it. Its custom hacks are pretty cool, and CakePHP is a complete framework in itself. However, like all other frameworks, it creates too much of work when we have to code some features again and again, like User-registration, a link manager, gallery and all.... Joomla does handle all this pretty well. So, after I saw Drake, I decided to write my same thing with Joomla as I like it as a CMS and it is used by us everyday.

I would like to thank Felix from ThinkingPHP the most, his research helped me a lot to do this.

Let's start with a nice fresh setup.

1) Download Fresh versions of Cake and Joomla
and install Cake first (for me its joomla_cake), Rename cakephp's /app/webroot/index.php to cakephp.php then install Joomla inside 'webroot' of Cake's directory.

So your directory structure will be like:

/app
---------/webroot
-----------------/joomla's index.php with other files
-----------------/cakephp.php (we will use this to triger Cake)
/cake
/vendors


Edit cakephp.php

Now we have disabled page rendering if we include this 'cakephp.php' in any external application.

2) Lets Create Joomla Component which will trigger Cake. : Lets call it 'com_cake'. This will be our master component in Joomla which will be triggered in case of when any unidentified Joomla's component is called... Lets add this functionality first.. Edit Joomla's index.php:

Lets get back to create the component:


/app
---------/webroot
-----------------/components (Joomla's component dir)
------------------------/com_cake
----------------------------------/cake.html.php (trigger to cakephp)
----------------------------------/cake.php (calls trigger with required options)
/cake
/vendors

We have to follow Joomla conventions for this module...
Lets create these 2 files, cake.php and cake.html.php:

cake.html.php:

cake.php: This file will judge which controller/action to pass in cakephp.

3) Time to check its functioning:

www.myserver.com/joomla/index.php?option=names&task=add

1. $_GET['option'] is passed to Joomla's index.php. There it concluded that component called 'names' is not found, so lets pass it to 'com_cake'

2. Now we are in cake.php (com_cake), we will check what controller and action it is requesting, and trigger the 'requestCakePHP' function.

This will make Joomla to assume that component being called is 'com_cake', and task is 'names/add'. This task will be then passed to Cake as $_GET['url'].

And we're done...

I see baked code of Cake's model 'name' inside Joomla.

Currently, I have not created it to handle the function arguments... but if I found this to be more useful... I will continue the project. The next updates will be:

1. Better handling of function arguments.
2. Customization of CakePHP's helpers to make use of right path and more.
3. Utilization of some plugins

Thanks
-- Max aka Abhimanyu Grover

There are 70% of the cases with PHP/Mysql applications where speed is slow because of bad sql queries. To know if you're not doing anything wrong, here's the procedure.

You have to record the time before executing an SQL query.

< ?php
$time = microtime();
$time = explode(' ', $time);
$time = $time[1] + $time[0];
$starttime = $time;
?>


Now, add this immediately after mysql_fetch_query function.

< ?php
$time = microtime();
$time = explode(" ", $time);
$time = $time[1] + $time[0];
$endtime = $time;
$totaltime = ($endtime - $starttime);
echo 'SQL Query executed in ' .$totaltime. ' seconds.';
?>

To review this thing, if you are having a code like:

mysql_connect("localhost", "mysql_user", "mysql_password") or
die("Could not connect: " . mysql_error());
mysql_select_db("mydb");
$result = mysql_query("SELECT id, name FROM mytable");
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_NUM)) {
printf("ID: %s Name: %s", $row[0], $row[1]);
}

mysql_free_result($result);
?>

Then, your final code must be:

mysql_connect("localhost", "mysql_user", "mysql_password") or
die("Could not connect: " . mysql_error());
mysql_select_db("mydb");
// code to initiate our time
$time = microtime();
$time = explode(' ', $time);
$time = $time[1] + $time[0];
$starttime = $time;
$result = mysql_query("SELECT id, name FROM mytable");
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_NUM)) {
printf("ID: %s Name: %s", $row[0], $row[1]);
}
// lets check the time gap
$time = microtime();
$time = explode(" ", $time);
$time = $time[1] + $time[0];
$endtime = $time;
$totaltime = ($endtime - $starttime);
echo 'SQL Query executed in ' .$totaltime. ' seconds.';
mysql_free_result($result);
?>


This code is not complete in itself, but enchancing it more can help a lot in projects.

While working on a real estate CMS, I realized that Google Maps API is having some legal issues in providing geocode data for UK, Japan or China. The call to API is failed with code 603 (G_GEO_UNAVAILABLE_ADDRESS) indicating that legal or contractual reasons prevent Google from returning the information. At first, I realized that we might have to drop the idea of Google Maps, but after a quick test with Yahoo Maps, i found Yahoo to be working fine with UK.

I never wanted to use Yahoo Maps, so i come up with this solution:

In order to run Google Maps for UK, you have to extract geocodes using Yahoo API, and then pass same geocodes to Google Maps.

Here's the Yahoo URL which return the geocode:

http://api.local.yahoo.com/MapsService/V1/geocode?appid=[your_app_id]&location=6%20Salisbury%20Square,%20LONDON

Just call Yahoo API for the data at place where you're requesting google.com, and pass on the geocodes to GoogleMap. And you're done !!

I found out a lot of people asking about this, so I decided to write a small post here, if anything needed in details, please post your comments.