Planet CakePHP

Something pretty useful in the CakePHP right now is VirtualFields.
A virtual field is a way to combine several fields to make a new ‘virtual’ one that exists when you read from the model. So with ‘firstname’ and ‘surname’ you can make a ‘full_name’ field which will allow you to use this within a find(‘list’) – a notoriously tricky task otherwise.
To do this on the User Model for example, just add the following to your app/models/user.php.
var $virtualFields = array(
'full_name' => 'CONCAT(User.firstname, " ", User.surname)'
);
Simple and powerful.
Available in CakePHP 1.3.*