Category: PHP Solutions

Introduction

In this blog, we’re going to look at the purpose of the schema migration tool provided by CakePHP and the benefits of using it in our project(s).

What does it do

CakePHP provides a plugin called migration which is supported by the core team. This plugin is a wrapper for the database migrations library Phinx.

Using a migration file we can create or drop tables, add or remove columns, create indexes and even insert data into our database. A migration file contains PHP script which handles our schema.

At some point of time as developers, we all go through a situation where we have a short deadline and a hand-full of work. In such situations if we are working with CakePHP index views, this blog may help you avoid some common mistakes. For this tutorial, we are targetting CakePHP 2 and CakePHP 3.

Prerequisite

• Knowledge on CakePHP views

You are planning to write a brilliant plugin. Its’ got a form from which you collect data from the user and register them to your website

In your plugin, to generate the form, you are probably using a shortcode. When the user hits that submit button you’ve to submit that data to the server and register him. There are multiple ways to do this.

We will look at two of these methods, their merits and demerits.

PHP’s date function strtotime is used to parse about any English textual date-time into a Unix time-stamp.

Syntax: int strtotime ( string $time [, int $now = time() ] );

Examples:

<?php
echo strtotime("now");
echo strtotime("+1 month");
?>

We’ve been working with Behat for one of our clients. It’s a wonderful technology that implements Behavior driven development (BDD) to increase the understanding between the customer and the software developer implementing the solution. It applies a testing based approach to software development. At the very beginning of development, test cases (in a language called Gherkin) are written. A software is only considered complete if it meets and passes these test cases.

We’ll be writing a series of posts to share our knowledge, starting with basic description of some important concepts related to Gherkin and Behat. A sample test case written in Gherkin for Behat could look something like this-