One of the frequent requirements in web design is that of thumbnail generation. Although there are many libraries out there I found PHP Thumb simple and quick enough to implement in a recent project. PHP Thumb is a light-weight image manipulation library aimed at thumbnail generation. It offers the ability to resize, create custom crops, or square crops from the center, and rotate the image. If the need arises you can also easily add custom functionality to the library through plugins.

Code examples are, of course, included in the post showing simple thumbnail creation, image rotation, cropping, resizing and outputting to a different format. There's a brief mention of custom plugins and the ability to chain functions.

Generate thumbs by visiting a URL such as your.com/thumbs/images/image.50x50.jpg. This will create a 50x50px thumbnail of your.com/images/image.jpg. The thumb will be stored on your server at your.com/thumbs/images/image.50x50.jpg so the next request for the same image will be loaded without loading php for ultra fast image cache.

The phpThumb tool lets you dynamically resize an image and, if one does not exist for it, make a thumbnail that's output and cached. From then on the script just pulls from that local copy. He includes his code to get it working and the mod_rewrite rule that maps an image request back to it (so it's still "/images/myimage.jpg" instead of "/app/phpThumb.php?src=myimage.jpg&w=100&h=100" in the img src).

• Thumbnails generation with phpThumb - phpThumb is a great thumbnail generator, it can generate thumbs with GD, GD2 or ImageMagick. There are many features like crop, rotate, watermark,... see all the features on the phpThumb homepage.
• HABTM Add & Delete Behavior - Many people gripe about the HABTM associations in CakePHP and how difficult it is to add or delete a single record. This behavior takes care of the task for you!
• Flexible controller and modelpaths - This short tutorial will show you how to organize your model and controller in subfolders of the controllers and models folders!
• Rails-like Data Validation - Validate your data like in rails: http://rails.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActiveRecord/Validations/ClassMethods.html