Planet CakePHP

If you are a CakePHP developer, you must know about DebugKit plugin by Mark Story already. It provides a debugging toolbar and enhanced debugging tools for CakePHP applications. As far as I remember, it is the first plugin I tried in my applications and this may be the case for most developers too.

So why am I posting it here again? Just to demonstrate how it can be used with Croogo's plugin/hook system. A few weeks ago, I forked DebugKit and made it Croogo ready so anyone can upload it from the admin panel and start using it without having to worry about editing php files (app_controller.php here) manually.

All I did was add two files under a new directory 'config' to this awesome plugin, and done! First was an YAML file and the other was a PHP file. The file structure looks like this:

• /app/plugins/debug_kit/
  • config (the new directory)
    • debug_kit_bootstrap.php
    • plugin.yml
  • controllers/
  • models/
  • views/
  • ...
  • debug_kit_app_controller.php
  • debug_kit_app_model.php

The YAML file

plugin.yml file is used for storing basic information about the plugin like it's description, author's name, website, etc. It can also contain information like it's dependencies. But we don't need anything like that for this plugin now:

name: DebugKit
description: DebugKit plugin

author: Mark Story
authorEmail:
authorUrl: http://mark-story.com

The plugin's bootstrap file

debug_kit_bootstrap.php is loaded every time the application bootstraps (only when the plugin is active). It handles configuration so DebugKit's Toolbar component is loaded in every controller.

<?php Croogo::hookComponent('*', 'DebugKit.Toolbar'); ?>

If you wanted the component to load only in, say, Users controller:

<?php Croogo::hookComponent('Users', 'DebugKit.Toolbar'); ?>

That wasn't too difficult, right? Now you can log in to Croogo's admin panel and activate the plugin from Extensions > Plugins page and you will see the toolbar at top right of your browser immediately. You can also deactivate it once you are done with debugging.

To learn more about how plugins work in Croogo, read the wiki.

Download

Get the modified version of DebugKit from http://github.com/fahad19/debug_kit.