The StarTutorial site has a new article posted showing you how to send email via SES in a CakePHP 3 application. SES is a service from Amazon Web Services that makes it simpler to send emails, the Simple Email Service (SES).

In this tutorial, we will show you how to set up CakePHP 3 to send email with AWS SES via SMTP. In our opinion, integrating AWS SES with CakePHP 3 by SMTP is more straightforward comparing to API.

They start off with the creation of the "EmailTransport" profile configuration dropped into the main application configuration file (defining connection and credential information). They then show how to create an "email profile" telling the framework to use the SES service definition. Finally they offer some advice about using the SES service on a Google Cloud instance and how to work around some of their port restrictions. CakePHP takes care of the rest, automatically understanding how to work with SES and using it transparently as the mailing service when you send your emails.

Lorna Mitchell has a post to her site with some helpful instructions for the CakePHP3 users out there around access control. The framework comes with no built-in functionality for authentication so she shows how to set up your own.

The newest version of CakePHP doesn't ship with built in ACL, which means you need to write your own. Personally I think this is a smart move, having looked at the one-size-fits-all solutions for previous versions of the framework and knowing that every system has different requirements, this version has good hooks and documentation on how to add something that works for your application. I thought I'd share what worked for mine.

She starts with some of the initial setup: creating the relationship between the users and her custom roles table and "baking" the controllers and templates. She then goes through the use of the authorize method and how it can handle the user/request combination to determine access. She includes the code for her auth class, showing both the authorize method and a simplified userHasRole method. She walks you through the code and one downfall the setup has: not being able to validate access in views and templates.

Mark Scherer has a post to his site looking at developing CakePHP 3+ plugins, showing how it's much easier than it used to be with previous versions of the framework.

he days of CakePHP 2 plugins and how difficult it was to actually develop plugins are over. Back in the days (OK, I still have to do it once in a while), there was even an app required to test a plugin. Since you didn’t want to have a boilerplate app for each plugin, you usually worked in your actual app. So you had cross contamination from that messing up your tests and stuff. Really annoying.

[...] While most of the concrete examples are about plugin development for CakePHP 3, the main ideas apply to all library code you write. And if you are a developer for other frameworks, the same principles apply, only the concrete implementation might differ.

He starts with the "real story" behind his development of a plugin - a need to integrate hashid support into a CakePHP v3-based application. He uses his own library as an example (here on GitHub) and shares his thought and development process in its creation. He then shares a few helpful tips for the would-be plugin authors out there:

• Thinking about what should be in core vs a plugin.
• Try to follow coding and package principles.
• Following the six package principles including common reuse, common closure and package coupling practices.

On the SmartTutorials.com site there's an article posted showing how to install CakePHP 3 with Composer, the popular PHP package management tool.

Installation of CakePHP 3 somewhat tricky/difficult for newbies. I will give you step by step instructions to install CakePHP 3 on your machine successfully, All you need to do is just follow this tutorial.

There's a brief section about requirements needed for the system you're installing it onto. Then they break the process up into a few different steps:

• Installing Composer if you haven't already
• Install CakePHP 3 using Composer
• Setting permissions for the temporary (tmp) directory

While their platform choice for the tutorial is Windows, the instructions mostly apply for linux-based systems. There's a few screenshots sprinkled in to show you what things should look like as you go along.