Planet CakePHP

Well, I’ve finally gathered enough good CakePHP links to warrant another tutorial roundup. It’s not that there haven’t been any good CakePHP posts out there – the blogs are full of ‘em, especially with 1.3 finally in beta – it’s just that I’ve been (and still am) pretty busy. But as always, I’m constantly coming across useful CakePHP tips, code, and tutorials that save me a lot of time. So I thought it might be useful to others to gather up some tutorials every once in a while and just get them out there. Some are new; some are old chestnuts.
Three quality community resources to showcase today:

• MultiTree Behavior – Thom (cyberthom) (Jan 27, 2010)
  Thom provides a robust, functional alternative to Cake’s core tree behavior for those who want multiple trees in one table. I wrote a little hack of the Tree behavior to accomplish this same task, but the MultiTree Behavior is a hell of a lot better. Nice job, Thom! The methods have mostly the same function names as the core Tree behavior, so you can basically drop this behavior in and then just change your $actsAs “Tree” to $actsAs “MultiTree”. I started using it this morning so I haven’t put it through all of its paces, but it seems pretty solid.
• Providing common functionality with AppShell – Joe Beeson (Oct 26, 2009)
  This little tutorial/accompanying script implements an “AppShell” that you can use a parent for your Shell classes, in the spirit of AppModel and AppController. I’ll be honest, I haven’t actually used Joe’s code yet, but the idea is great. I’m a bit surprised that the core doesn’t already provide this functionality – instead of YourShell -> AppShell -> Shell (just like YourModel -> AppModel -> Model), the extension chain is just YourShell -> Shell. I guess that AppShell isn’t in the core simply because the Shell class is woefully underused by most developers. But if you find yourself writing a lot of shell scripts with common functionality, then AppShell looks like a good time saver.
• Authsome Component – Felix Geisendörfer, Debuggable (Dec 25, 2009)
  This is another “haven’t used it yet, but definitely will” bit of code by Felix Geisendörfer, who’s released his share of nice code. Authsome is a less intrusive replacement for the core Auth component, and it looks pretty slick and simple. It handles logging in a lot better than the Auth component, and I like the static Authsome::get(‘user_variable’) functionality.