The Bakery, the CakePHP repository, has had several new components, articles and tutorials posted lately. Here's a list of a few:

• MySQL collation behavior
• Image Magick Resize Helper
• Tidy Output Filtering
• Setting SVN Ignore properties
• Release: Pure Cake Power in RC1

Be sure to check out The Bakery for more great articles, tutorial, components and helpers for this flexible framework.

Mikko Koppanen has posted another quick hit ImageMagick hint to his blog - this time it deal with "seam carving", a process for cropping and resampling of an image to make a different composite picture.

Today I was reading trough the ImageMagick ChangeLog and noticed an interesting entry. "Add support for liquid rescaling". I rushed to check the MagickWand API docs and there it was: MagickLiquidRescaleImage! After about ten minutes of hacking the Imagick support was done. Needless to say; I was excited

You'll need to have the libqr library compiled into the ImageMagick installation, but the actual use of the functionality is simple - about three or four lines do the work for you. He includes the original image and the result from his test (as well as another example of the same result image scaled down automatically.

Mikko Koppanen has posted another quick example of using the ImageMagick functionality in PHP - overlaying a string of text over a currently existing image.

Ever had the situation where you have a piece of string which you need to overlay on an image? Maybe a situation where the area reserved for the string is known in pixels but you need to know the font size to fill most of the area? Think no more!

In his example (ready to cut and paste), he defines the text in a variable and, with the help of the newPseudoImage method, adds the text over the top of his sample image. Example input and output is provided.

Over on SitePoint.com today, there's a new tutorial demonstrating an alternative to the usual GD library examples of working with images, opting instead for ImageMagick.

The key component for making dynamic images a reality on your site is an image manipulation program that's controlled by the code that generates your web pages. Even though this article uses PHP as the scripting language, other languages -- such as Perl and Ruby -- can be used just as easily, provided that the image manipulation program that you're considering has an application programming interface (API) for the chosen language.

He decided on ImageMagick for a few reasons, including that it's more supported by web hosts, it runs on Windows and Linux, and it's robust and powerful enough to handle everything from small to large tasks without missing a beat.

That said, he gets into the code, showing how a bit of PHP code can read in an image and spit back out information about it (height, width, etc), force a reduction of an uploaded image, scale down an image to fit a certian size, change it to a different type of image, and image rotation.