One of my biggest gripes with CakePHP is that there isn’t a built in way to easily define how models report back their “name” to views.  There is a handy variable called $displayField, but currently (1.2 RC3) that only accepts a single field.

This tutorial will walk you though setting up a functioning Windows-Apache-PHP-MySQL + CakePHP installation on Windows XP.  This tutorial should also work for Windows 2000 or Vista, but since I’m not testing in that environment you should know that this was written with Windows XP in mind.

An interesting topic about CakePHP migration support was raised in the CakePHP discussion group recently. Dardo Sordi wrote a compelling and comprehensive argument in favor of not using migrations in favor of CakePHP’s built in Schema tool. He provided an excellent overview of the tool and a suggested workflow for how he currently uses it in his work.

I was unable to locate a simple file upload tutorial for CakePHP 1.2. Once I figured it out with the help of Aditya Mooley’s filePost.tar.gz from August 9th 2005. Unfortunately his tutorial and demo are no longer active, so I’ve resurrected the code, updated it for CakePHP 1.2 and will walk you through it.

I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard this week and wanted to provide a writeup covering everything you’ll need to know get to a good development environment ready on a fresh (clean) Leopard installation.

NOTE: Due to the subject matter contained in this post I am not providing any support for the following steps.