Chris Hartjes has a new post to his blog today focusing on using a bit of the CakePHP framework's functionality from the command line.

I'm porting a spaghetti-PHP application over to using CakePHP I am moving their existing authorization system over to using Cake's Auth component. Of course, they are storing all their passwords in plaintext in the user account table, so I needed an easy way to convert all the existing passwords over to be encrypted using the same hash that Auth would use.

With the help of the shells and tasks that the framework makes availiable, he's able to make a simple 24 line class (EncryptPasswordShell) that extends the Shell object and loops through the data to push it back into the database in the correct password format.

On the Symfony blog today, Romain Dorgueil shows how to create tasks to help automate things in your application like database updates, console scripts or other "repetitive maintenance tasks".

Symfony 1.1 extends symfony 1.0 pake tasks to create a powerful and uniform command line utility for your projects, fully integrated with the symfony Command Line Interface (CLI).

This means that is has the abilities to automatically support a "help" parameter, to grab a current task list the app is using, correct handling of the input parameters, set up a good environment and make sure that the source is readable. The post shows how to create a new task for your application - their examples are a "doNothingTask" that, well, does a lot of nothing and the typical "doHelloWorldTask" that just echoes.

They show how to define the task (including a namespace for it) and how to run it, outputing the results of the execute() method ("I did nothing successfully!" in the first case and a string of passed in parameters in the second.

On the Developer Tutorials blog, Akash Mehta has posted an introduction to working with command-line PHP scripts and cron jobs for site automation.

Scheduled tasks are a fairly common feature in modern web applications. From cleaning out caches every 24 hours to checking subscription periods and even generating reports, more web applications live by the clock than ever before. But how do we schedule the execution of a PHP script on the server side?

He shows the two key things to getting it working - an example of a command-line call to a PHP script (executed through his /usr/bin/php) and an example of a line from a crontab showing how to execute the script at midnight every day.

On the Tiger Heron blog, there's a continuation of the series that Tony Freixas has been writing to following the beginning steps of working with PHP. First there was the download/install, then setting up a development environment. This time, he actually gets around to writing a bit of basic code.

Specifically, I will describe how I boot my PHP scripts and why I boot them the way I do. Part 1 shows how my requirements for code portability and maintainability influence the boot process. Part 2 will go into more detail about the specific steps executed by the boot code.

His basic task for the first example is to make a templating sort of system, calling a Navigation class to output links in list items. He outlines the goals of the project, what he's found for his current solution and some alternatives he's discovered along the way.

Matthew Turland has been working on a new project as a part of the Zend Framework - a wrapper around the Remember the Milk website API.

RTM is basically a TODO list on serious steroids. It's the Swiss Army Knife of task management. It allows you to manage multiple lists of tasks. You can add them easily from a variety of mediums, tag them, prioritize them, set deadlines for them, have them repeat, get reminders for them, tie them to physical real world location, and share them.

He's even already issued a proposal for the functionality to the project to hep further along its inclusion. His goal is to get it included in the core for the framework within the next two releases.

On the Symfony-framework.com website, there's a look at what's new in the latest Symfony build, version 1.1, as presented by Fabien Potencier at this year's International PHP Conference 2007.

In this article, I will briefly explain all the significant changes of Symfony 1.1 so that you will have fewer doubts deciding between: rewrite part of your old code, simply update your application or use the new Symfony 1.1 only in new developments.

There's three things he mentions - the new task framework to help organize code development, the reorganization of the event dispatcher and its dependencies, and the new Form, Widget and Validator framework.

On his ThinkingPHP blog today, Felix Geisendorfer hands out mor eCakePHP goodness with some talk about working with the popular CakePHP framework in an unlikely place - on the command line with the "bake" utility.

The "bake" utility is included with the CakePHP distribution and helps a developer scaffold out an application with minimal effort. Things have been changed in the recent distributions, though:

Unlike the old bake.php, which was only used to auto-generate code for you, this one follows a much cooler concept. The main idea is to have an interface to a wide variety Tasks.

The new and improved "bake" program takes the tasks created and builds out a bit more functionality than just the scaffolding as the version before did. Felix includes an example of a task (a simple echo) just to show how it's formatted.