Planet CakePHP

In earlier versions of CakePHP we had loadModel function to load model on the fly. There had been other correspondents like loadHelper to load helpers and so on. Later by the coming of 1.2 it turned into App::import(’Model’, ‘model_name’). By using later App::import() we can load core libraries, controllers, models, helpers, components and behaviors on the fly whenever needed. Following the syntax of import method but in most cases import uses only first two arrangements though:

App::import($type, $name, $parent, $search, $file, $return);

Although we use the same import method to load these classes (models, helpers etc.) they may look to use slightly different approach to construct or create class objects. In fact they simply use the class name as always to create an object. For example to load a model “User” (class name is User) we use:

After looking at an interesting Google group topic
Poll: what do you hate about CakePHP? i have tried to sum up the facts which people reasoned for hating/disliking CakePHP. Please be noted that all the facts listed here are based on users postings in the very topic and I have not tried to reproduce/test them all in a working environment. So, please take them home with your own consent. At least have a look at this topic and follow other links / facts behind the reason for such posting of users.
Here are the so called shortcomings of CakePHP:

What is getID3?
getID3() is an open-source, cross-platform software library for the PHP language written by James Heinrich and Allan Hansen. getID3() can extract information from multimedia file formats: audio, video and images in various formats. Information extracted includes playtime, metadata, bitrate, sample rate, number of channels, and much more. getID3() can also write metadata (tags) to several formats.
Component for CakePHP
Its very straight forward to use getid3() in cakephp and this article describes how i used it in my cakephp application. I downloaded getid3() library, extracted it to vendors directory and created a component named getid3. Then i used it in my controller class to extract the media file information.

An ordinary yet useful piece of hack to the way the cakephp pagination’s pages “showing page” parameter is displayed. As default, we are used to use $paginator->counter() method which gives us a counter string for the paged result set like “Showing page 1 of 3″. But in my latest project task i needed to show results set something like “Showing 1 to 20 of total 46″.
To display the result set like this, i wrote a few lines of code in my view using $paginator object values. Here are the lines of code which i place right under the $paginator->options() call: