On the Debuggable blog Felix Geisendorfer points out the need for some more "cooks in the kitchen" - people to fill some CakePHP related positions in companies all over.

There are new jobs in the world of CakePHP. The CakePHP job board has seen the following additions.

The new items include positions at About.com, Makatto.com and Blue Chips. Check out the job board for more information on these and other open CakePHP-related positions.

In a recent post on his blog David Otton shares some of his thoughts on a major struggle between web developers (and not just PHP ones) - frameworks versus libraries.

We all know that loose coupling is good and tight coupling is bad, so why, over the past couple of years, has the web industry gone nuts for tightly-coupled frameworks?

He talks about the evolution of the framework, how Ruby on Rails really popularized it and some of his experience with a few of the PHP ones (CakePHP, Zend Framework, CodeIgniter and Symfony). Of those he experienced, he felt that that strongest player of the group was the Zend Framework. It allowed for the framework feel and functionality but provided enough separation to be able to drop in libraries and configure custom settings easily.

In this new post to his blog Chris Hartjes mentions a "nifty little feature" that the latest version of the CakePHP framework has - dynamic models.

By default now, Cake will automatically use the AppModel class and create a unique alias to a database table if it does not find the file. This means that if you have a table that follows the Cake conventions, needs no validation, and has no associations to other tables, you don't even have to create the model file any more. Woah, talk about a serious time saver in some cases.

He also mentions a gotcha to keep an eye out for - misspelling the model name when you use it. It'll definitely break things. You can find out more about models in CakePHP from this section in their manual, The Cookbook.

On the Debuggable blog Felix Geisendorfer points out a new scrap from their repository - one to interface with the Amazon Web Service.

Just wanted to let you know about a new addition to the debuggable scraps repository: An API for the Amazon Associates Web Service. Right now it's really just a simple wrapper to allow you to search their catalog since that was all I needed for now.

You can download the scrap and easily integrate it with your app - he includes some sample code to show you exactly how.

Jonathan Snook has posted an update to a previous post about validating multiple input fields at the same time in a CakePHP application. This update changes the way the validation is handled and moves it over into a Behavior.

Using the new behavior is much like using the script as it was before. You can name the validation properties to include the action name and it'll automatically set that validation set as the default.

His behavior lets you define validation rules, both included in a default set and as callbacks. He includes an example of its use and the full code (all thirty lines of it) for the behavior itself.

On the Debuggable blog today Tim Koschutzki looks at another testing topics for the CakePHP framework - a cleaner way for testing models.

Up until now there was always a need to create a so-called test model that extends your model-under-test in order to overwrite its $useDbConfig setting to be 'test_suite'. By that you ensured that your models run with the test_suite datasource when the tests are run. [...] Nate proposed ClassRegistry::config(), which allows you to tell the ClassRegistry class which datasource it shall use when ClassRegistry::init() is used the next time (and thereby a model is instantiated).

He includes an example of the new functionality - a test case ensuring that three articles are there and are marked as published. The registry makes it easier to automatically create the ArticleTest instance inside the test case rather than having to manually declare and define it.

A new post to the Debuggable blog points out an upcoming conference for all of the CakePHP-heads out there - the CakePHP Workshop happening in Raleigh, NC September 6th and 7th.

Felix Geisendorfer notes:

Tim and I are very thrilled to announce the very first two-day workshop for everybody who is interested in mastering the CakePHP framework. The event is a collaboration between Debuggable Limited and the Cake Software foundation.

The cost for the event is $600 USD for a normal admission and $500 USD for a student admission. Speakers will include Garrett Woodworth, Nate Abele and Felix and Tim (of the Debuggable blog). The post includes a "what to expect" for attendees and a complete listing of the talks for each day and descriptions of each session.

Signup now to reserve your spot.

In a new blog post today Jonathan Snook shows how to create a contact form for your CakePHP application (version 1.2).

Most contact forms take a name and feedback from a user and mail it off to the administrator but don't store any information in the database. This tutorial will show how to use CakePHP's models, even when no table is being used.

He shows how to define the model class, set up the mapping of columns to named elements and the code to handle the submit. It just sends a basic email with the contents of the form with a few validation rules to ensure it's not abused. Simple stuff...

On the Zenning! blog there's a recent post, the first part of a series, that looks at various web application frameworks both PHP and not (including Ruby on Rails, Prado and Django).

As of now, we are moving through the era of web application frameworks. That's the landscape we are surrounded with. Plenty of frameworks have been built during these years broadly categorized under software frameworks, web application frameworks and JavaScript frameworks (or libraries), and plenty more are being developed.

He starts with these frameworks:

• CakePHP
• CodeIgniter
• Symfony
• Prado
• Django
• Ruby on Rails

He looks at the non-PHP frameworks first to see how difficult they'd be to get into. Despite reservations about the different language structure, he shows favoritism towards Ruby on Rails. He has reviewed the PHP frameworks yet, so it's not a final decision.

In this new post, Chris Hartjes takes a look at something that is one of the banes of most programmers' existence - documentation. In it he wonders what should really be considered documentation and the importance of it.

As a committed user of open source technologies, the difference between me using something and not using something is the documentation. Is there documentation for it? Is it easy to find? Does it answer my questions? Is there someone I can call an idiot if I disagree with the level of documentation? These are all very important questions.

He uses the illustration of the documentation of the CakePHP framework that's helpful, but only really after you learn how to use the framework in the first place. He mentions people on both sides of the fence - those that love the framework and love the documentation and those that moved on to something simpler because they just couldn't get it.

He also mentions the variety of sources that can provide "documentation" for the framework when you're getting a bit stuck - everything from blogs to The Bakery to a different sort of documentation, unit test.