On the Debuggable blog Tim Koschutzki shows a way to have more than one paginated item on your page at a time (in a CakePHP application).

Many of you might have run into the problem of having multiple boxes on the same page that need to be paginated. For example you might have a left column with a list of members of your site and a right column that shows for a example a list of forums. Yeah, that's not the best example, but you get the idea.

The typical CakePHP pagination functional assumes that there's only one block of information that needs to be paginated per page. With Tim's modification, the model name for where the data is being pulled from is appended to the end of the URL and parsed by the script to know which is which.

Updating from a previous post, Jonathan Snook has updates some of his comments about a simple way to make static pages in your CakePHP framework application:

So it seems that the old code I had didn't work in debug mode, although on the current CakePHP 1.2 RC2, I'm not even sure it works at all. However, I decided to take some time to revisit the code. Last time, I simply hacked up the missingAction and missingController calls and it felt kludgy. It looked kludgy.

Instead of abusing the error handler like before he decides to opt for this missingAction/missingController combo to handle the fall through. It doesn't seem to be working 100% correctly, though and he's put in a ticket to see if its a bug or by design.

On the KillerPHP blog today, Stefan Mischook comments on whether or not WordPress version 2.5.1 "sucks".

I just recently installed the this latest version of Wordpress (2.5.1) and quickly found it hanging (while trying to load a page) for as long as 40-50 seconds! I then proceeded to isolate the potential causes (database, custom fields, custom theme) and have since found out that something stinks in 2.5.1's core.

He details some of the steps he took to try to track down the bug - installing on another server, searching the web for others with the same issue. His suggestion?

Before you upgrade your old working installation of Wordpress, I would suggest that you test 2.5.1 in some other directory just to be sure it works with your server.

On his ThisLab blog, Fred Wu has posted some quick benchmarks comparing some of the popular frameworks out there - Ruby on Rails/Passenger versus CodeIgniter/Kohana.

Last few days I have been playing with Ruby and Rails, again. Today, when someone was asking on a forum about the efficiency of web frameworks, I thought I'd give the few frameworks I work with some more benchmark testing.

His benchmarking is based on basic "Hello World" page requests for each of the frameworks. His results were interesting with CodeIgniter coming out with the fewest number of requests responded to (per second) and Rails coming out on top by a margin of about eighty or ninety over CodeIgniter/Kohana.

On his blog today, Stefan Mischook shares his reasoning for making all of your pages PHP pages, regardless of static content or dynamic.

By making all your web pages PHP pages from the start, you are basically leaving open the possibility of using PHP in your web pages at any time.

By his reasoning, it provides an "out" for you later on should you decide that a page needs to have some dynamic content thrown in there somewhere (without having to change the filename - bad for SEO, supposedly).

On the Developer Tutorials Blog today, there's a new post aimed at WordPress users to help them on the path to becoming "power users" with five tips.

If you're a wordpress power user, you'll inevitably have some questions about how you can improve your blog or add new features. Here are five tips that will make life easier for people wanting to maximize their use of Wordpress.

The list is:

• Quickly Find Page/Post ID
• Custom Front Page
• Password Protect Wordpress
• Protect from the 'Digg Efect' with HTML
• Stop Hackers

Each of them with their own explanations (and links to other resources detailing how they're done).

The New Earth Online has a quick look at one easy method for speeding up your site in a few different ways - caching pages and information with things like Cache_Lite and APC.

As your site traffic grows it takes longer and longer to generate a dynamic page from sending multiple queries to a database. One possible solution to limit queries is to cache the result of each query that is needed, or to have a complete full page cache for your site.

They look at the two ways I mentioned - the Cache_Lite PEAR package and the APC extension (that will soon be included by default in the stable PHP releases). Bits of code are provided for each showing how to get them set up and get them working inside of your application.

Michael Girouard has posted his 10,00 foot view of the typical structure of an Model/View/Controller application (and framework) and how a page request is handled:

In my previous article, I announced that I would be documenting the process of developing a simple MVC framework. In this post I will go into a little more detail about each of the specific components of our MVC and will discuss the series of events which occur each time a page loads, otherwise known as the page load scenario.

He talks about how URIs work, the role of mod_rewrite, several of the objects involved (like the Front Controller, Request, Route and View) and how they all fit in with the custom Models, Views and Controllers the user could define.

On his blog, Padraic Brady talks about the creation of custom web pages (in the Zend Framework) with the help of the Zend_View enhancements that have been introduced lately.

With the inclusion of Zend_View Enhanced as first documented, discussed and publicized in this blog series, in the Zend Framework as of 1.5.0 I'd like to thank everyone involved in the process. [...] The main problem of a complex View, is that the current Controller is only aware of a subset of its own required Model (data) and the current View. So how do do you get the View to include extra sections - for example, details from Technorati for your blog - which are common to ALL pages?

Normally, a call to _forward() would have been the norm, but this was more often overly complex for what the developer wanted to do. The new Composite View and View Helpers seem to be the remedy. They make it simpler to grab that information and pull it in without the need to make a whole other framework request to do so.

In a (very) quick note on his blog today Stoyan Stefanov points out that a presentation of his posted over on Slideshare made the front page Featured section (with over 2600 views too!).

Not bad. Especially having in mind that this is the second time around. [...] Slideshare is a great service nevertheless, just like on youtube, you can spend hours browsing people's presentation slides.

The presentation was originally given at the PHP Quebec conference this year (2008).