I’m using XAMPP to run my Apache, MySQL, and PHP installation.

For the most part the standard CakePHP installation works flawlessly. So if you have a site titled ‘mydomain’ running on localhost in XAMPP, and if XAMPP is running, you will be able to access it from http://localhost/mydomain and you will see your Cake installation. What I consistently run into however, is my Cake installation’s webroot isn’t set up properly out of the box, so while I can see the core Cake installation, it isn’t able to access the cake.generic.css stylesheet and consequently I see the page as unstyled text.

The Cake manual indicates that you need to change the DocumentRoot for to webroot, however because XAMPP is basically operating as a Virtual Host you don’t want to change the DocumentRoot but rather set up an Alias within XAMPP’s httpd.conf file.

The XAMPP httpd.conf file is located here: Applications/xampp/etc/httpd.conf

Scroll down to the area where you see the Alias established for phpmyadmin and paste the following replacing ‘yourdomain’ with the root location of your CakePHP install…

Alias /yourdomain /Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/htdocs/yourdomain/app/webroot
<Directory “/Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/htdocs/yourdomain”>
AllowOverride All
Options All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

Once you’ve added the alias which basically points the root of ‘yourdomain’ to the /app/webroot/ directory,
you will need to restart XAMPP or the Apache service within XAMPP.

Now when you goto http://localhost/yourdomain, you will see the working CakePHP application, complete with working stylesheets.

ShareThis

After my first logon I didn’t come back to twitter for a good 3 or 4 months. Now I’m logging on each day. As I started to use twitter the real value for marketers was obvious. Anybody currently using twitter already gets it. Anybody who doesn’t is missing a great opportunity to build social media credibility and credits.

The tweeters who have the most followers (see twitter’s top 100 tweeters at twitterholic.com) also have the most opportunity to influence the success of websites, applications, or anything they choose. They are the tipping points for the causes that they adopt. When Guy Kawasaki or Leo Laporte decide to promote an idea or link, they have a built in audience listening to them and following their lead. This becomes quite powerful for tweeters with a lot of followers. Kawasaki and Laporte already have pretty large audiences having been in the media for quite some time, however there are a number of tweeters who aren’t part of the traditional media, but are tweeting up a storm. Take local Phoenician Brian Shaler for example, he has over 8,000 followers. There is a pretty good chance that at any one time 10% (*Note: I made this number up but I think its probably realistic) or around 800 of his followers listening, so when Brian tweets, people listen. Just like E.F. Hutton.

One more thing to consider, as most tweeters are basically early adopters of pretty simple but cutting edge social networking it is very likely that they are also influencers within their social spheres. When they tweet about something they’re probably tweeting about it outside of twitter as well. They’re likely to blog about it, discuss it at the coffee shop, and distribute it with whatever means they use. They are the connectors, mavens, and salesmen that Gladwell talks about all rolled into one.

Now as a marketer, it’s pretty apparent how powerful this platform is. Imagine what you could do for your product, service, website, etc. if you manage to get the top tweeters discussing your offering? Imagine what you could do as you build up your own list of followers. Or, and maybe even more important, Robert Scoble (Scobelizer) suggests the question, imagine what you can learn if you follow a lot of people? You might see the inception of a trend, be one of the first to hear about a product launch, or maybe just have a better or at least more timely perspective on what is driving social media right now.

You can follow me on twitter at http://twitter.com/brianfidler.

ShareThis

Click on the “Mange Subscriptions” link in the left hand column at the bottom of the page. This will take you to your Settings for Google Reader. If you click on the “Goodies” tab, you’ll have access to some buttons you can add to your toolbar (at least in Firefox, i’m not sure about IE). Once you drag the “Subscribe” button into your toolbar, you can then simple click on it whenever you find yourself at a site you’d like to monitor and if there is an RSS feed it will automatically add it to your Reader subscriptions.

ShareThis

I get the payoff with LinkedIn as it is allowing me to reconnect with old friends from school and connections I’ve made in the past. It’s almost viral in nature and I find myself constantly remarking…”i totally forgot about that person!” That is the magic. It’s fun to reconnect with people from your past. Since putting effort into updating my profile I’ve also found that LinkedIn provides a great professional resource. I get emails from recruiters at least once a week. What is even more interesting is that when I LinkIn with the recruiter I also get a rare glimpse of my competition for a position because they’re LinkingIn with other candidates as well. It’s pretty transparent, and it’s really useful and cool.

Twitter I wasn’t so sure about when I signed up for it. After my first test-drive I didn’t touch it for months. Then about 3 weeks ago, a friend started following me. I decided to get back into the twitter fold and at least commit to it for a while. Twitter, it turns out, is pretty powerful. A twitterer with many followers can soon command a lot of attention. This can lead to opportunities. More important to most people on Twitter is that it acts as a self-designed filter to manage your information flow. If I follow interesting people who have interesting things to say and can direct me to interesting websites, I will spend more time on interesting and less time on bla. This I value a lot.

ShareThis

I’m trying to figure out how this translates to CakePHP right now. This is going to be a very fluid post because I’m hoping that by writing about the issues that confuse me I will be able to eventually stumble upon the solutions. I feel a lot like I did when I was first learning alpha channels in Photoshop (before PS had layers). I remember the moment I ‘got it’ and it totally opened up Photoshop for me. Now I’m going to headbut CakePHP until I get the same end result.

Elements! So by placing chunks of my code into CakePHP’s Elements I can efficiently get access to and reuse that code. So for instance I have place my mast into an element, my footer into an element, and my primary navigation into an element. Elements can be cached in CakePHP 1.2 so not only do I get the benefit of reusable blocks of code, but I also gain the efficiency of having these blocks automatically cached on the users browser.

ShareThis

I’ve been watching the screencasts and my favorite so far (I’m showing what a newbie I am!) is the screencast titled Episode 1: Using Debug Messages. It helped me quickly understand how to begin developing the structure for my Cake applications. I kind of already realized it but Cake will tell you which file you are missing, show you the code structure for the file, and show you where that file should be located. That simplifies things quite a bit for me. If you are comfortable using the command line (i.e. Terminal on a Mac) then I think “baking” your application takes care of a lot of this too. Personally I think it’s good practice to get familiar with the file structure while your learning because you’re going to need to make changes and you’ll need to know where things are.

I know this is all obvious stuff for non-newbies, but as a newbie it made my beginning simpler.

There is also a new podcast available that isn’t very visible on cakephp.org or in the bakery. I’m not sure how I stumbled upon it but since it isn’t very visible, I’ll try to make it so. It is at http://live.cakephp.org/. There is only one podcast posted so far but I’m a big fan of podcasts and learning. Sometimes it just is good to kind of absorb the culture a little and by surrounding yourself with CakePHP resources, the learning curve can be reduced.

Another great resource to get off the ground is David Golding’s The Newbie’s Introduction to CakePHP. He does a nice job showing you how to set up CakePHP locally on your computer using either MAMP or XAMPP. He also does a nice job describing the MVC architecture and begins walking you through a tutorial on setting up a project.

ShareThis

I decided to begin developing all of my future websites using some sort of framework. I’ve reviewed a number of different frameworks that work with PHP and developed a list of criteria that are important to me…

1. Framework needs to work with PHP5
2. Needs to be relatively lightweight
3. Needs to be customizable and be able to work with other code such as 3rd party shopping carts, scripts, etc.
4. Needs to have an active community that can provide support assistance when I’m stuck
5. Should build on my existing PHP knowledge and not require me to learn an entirely new language

I’ve looked at a number of different frameworks including CakePHP, ExpressionEngine, CodeIgniter, MODx CMS, and Symfony and come to the conclusion that I am going to dedicate my efforts to learning CakePHP. This was not an easy choice and while reviewing the different frameworks and the pros and cons of each noticed a trend of developers who actually tried to develop within each of the frameworks. I didn’t do this, I focused on reviewing what the frameworks could provide and user comments relating to the different frameworks. I’m a bit indecisive when it comes to new web technology and really don’t have the time to test all sorts of frameworks in any sort of depth.

I came to my conclusion on which framework would be best for me by setting the criteria that it would need to work on PHP 4 and PHP 5, because some of my clients insist on their own hosting which might still be PHP 4, and a good support community. CakePHP, ExpressionEngine, and MODx CMS, were the three finalists because Symfony is PHP 5 only. I really like both ExpressionEngine and MODx CMS because they’ve already developed a “front-end” which is relatively user friendly and only requires that a user set up the structure of their page and then develop the html. I didn’t like the fact that both require learning a proprietary (albeit pretty simple) way of coding/tagging items that I would be required to learn. Because MODx CMS and ExpressionEngine are very similar I’d probably lean towards using MODx over EE. When I explored the different communities my choice became much much easier however. I focused on IRC channels and online groups. In the IRC channels (these numbers are based on right now) the CakePHP channel has 156 members and is pretty active, the EE channel has 6 members and is not very active, and the MODx channel has 18 members and is (pun intended) MODerately active. These numbers don’t lie, CakePHP is clearly the winner win it comes to support. In addition CakePHP has a great and active Google Group.

As I enter the world of CakePHP I’ll keep this blog updated with any information which I find helpful for designers/developers who choose to start using CakePHP.

ShareThis

Here are some great resources (in no particular order) that I use when I need expand or develop a color palette:

1. http://www.colr.org/
   colr.org allows you to quickly harvest the colors from a photograph and organize them into a palette. You could also do this in Photoshop but I think they’ve created a pretty intuitive and elegant solution.
2. Pantone Essentials
   Every designer needs a set of Pantone swatch books and the Pantone Essentials is invaluable and very versatile. If you can afford it make certain to also get their Solid Chip books which are great when you need to take some swatches with you.
3. http://www.colourlovers.com/
   This is another site similar to colr.org but much more indepth and community focused. They track color trends and provide some more great tools for developing your palettes. They also have a very interesting and sometimes thought provoking blog, all about color.
4. color synthAxis
   This site provides an interesting approach to color palette design with some very interesting Flash tools. It’s a bit of eye candy but fun to play around with.
5. kuler from Adobe Labs
   kuler really is kul. Not only does it allow you to quickly and easily develop color palettes but it also will automatically save them as color profiles that can be imported directly into any of Adobes design applications. Very Kul!

ShareThis

The scope of the job will dictate many of the rules you must follow if you want to complete a successful project. This probably seems obvious but you’d be surprised how many times designs get to the final stage of completion and the file is set up totally wrong for it’s particular medium.

Here are a few common considerations:

• How many colors is the job? Identify whether the job is a spot color, process color, or a combo of the two. Trust me, with most design taking place on the computer screen, many designers and artists don’t ever consider how the final piece will be produced or printed.
• Who is your printer? Talk with your printer and their prepress department will be able to help you plan out the best way to set up your project from the beginning. Planning will always save a lot of headaches when the final piece is ready to print.
• What are the dimensions? What is the final trimmed size of your piece? Are there bleeds? Folds? Make certain that you know exactly how you want the final piece to look. Create a mock-up and share it with your printer. Again, talking with your printer will save inevitable headaches down the line. They may have initially bid the job thinking it was a c-fold when it was actually an accordian fold. The ink coverage on a piece will affect how the printer chooses to imposition the job on the press. If they were planning for a piece with light ink coverage they might not worry about the direction of paper grain which can cause the paper to crack and is very noticable if there is heavy ink coverage.
• Are you printing with lithography? Flexography? Thermography? Digital? Each of these processes require the file to be set up a little bit differently. And again, if you are uncertain about the best practices for a specific type of printing, discuss the issues with your printer, show them your artwork, and you’ll be much more likely to have a successfully printed piece.

ShareThis

ShareThis