DevShed has posted the fifth part of their series looking at CodeIgniter and its use to make a simple blogging application. The focus this time is on the output, working with the views to "pretty up" the resulting pages.

Although in its current state, the blogger works well, its visual presentation looks pretty primitive. Therefore, in this fifth part of the series I'll be adding some CSS styles to the view files that comprise this blog application to improve its look and feel.

They start with a review of the code so far - a simple blogging app with the ability to let users comment on each entry. The HTML and CSS you'll need to add to the views to make the output look more like this.

The eZ Components project has release their latest stable version - 2008.2 - for public consumption today:

The development team is happy to announce the release of the seventh major version of eZ Components: version 2008.2. The main new development of this release is focused on the MvcTools (and accompanying) components.

The MvcTools component implements the tools for a framework, providing a dispatcher, request parsers, routing, view support and a response writer. Examples of its use can be found in the subversion repository for the project. You can see the full Changlog for the release here and you can download the latest release here.

In an effort to dispel some of the rumors and myths around the CakePHP framework (as presented most recently by a different blogger) Chris Hartjes has made a new "mythbuster" post to his blog today with a rebuttal to the points from the other article.

I ran across an article comparing CakePHP and Symfony and found that the writer had a number of preconceived ideas about CakePHP. These same ideas keep popping up everywhere, used by people looking to get their hate on about CakePHP. I sent a very well-reasoned email to the writer clearing up some of those misconceptions [...] So, in the interest of clarifying things about CakePHP I thought I would share that email, slightly rewritten for this blog posting, but the content is roughly the same.

The post/email covers a few different topics some might have misconceptions about concerning the framework:

• Lack of Documentation
• Scaffolding
• Models are tied to controllers in a 1:1 relationship
• Cake's Ajax and Javascript helpers do not support graceful degradation
• Cake's HTML and Form helpers produces bad markup
• Unit tests are an afterthought
• CakePHP is not an "enterprise capable framework"

If you're looking for a framework to try out on your next Web 2.0 application, Knut Urdalen suggests you give Yii a try.

The Yii Framework is built for speed and the goal is to provide the best possible framework for your next large-scale web 2.0 applications. With it's superior performance, Yii still provides an easy-to-use and highly extensible feature set that is richer than most other frameworks.

If you haven't tried it, he points out the "getting started" tutorial offered on the Yii site as well as some of the performance benchmarks (including those for the next release, 1.0.1).

DevShed continues their series on using CodeIgniter to make a simple blogging application with this new article. It focuses on the next step in the blog's evolution - making it able to accept user comments.

A decent blog application, however, must provide users with a mechanism that lets them post their comments easily, and the simplest way to do this is via an HTML form. Therefore, in the next few lines, I'll be explaining how to modify the controller class and the comments view file created in the preceding article to incorporate a basic web form that permits users to post comments on a particular blog entry.

They start by reviewing the code and application so far, ensuring we're all on the same page. From there, they add code into the controller to handle the form input and make a view to create the form itself.

Mike Davies has posted a comparison he's worked up between the CakePHP and Symfony PHP frameworks:

Asking around in work (well, the extended group of web developers that used to be the phenomenal Yahoo Web Dev team in London, and Munich) for PHP framework suggestions, the most frequently recommended one was Django (go figure!), followed by symfony, Code Igniter, and one solitary suggestion of Cake PHP.

He gives overviews of each citing things like features, database integration, how they implement MVC and documentation. His comparison is quick, pointing out that the right tool for his job ended up being symfony - a bit more complicated, but more of what he needed.

Ray Cheung posted his comparison of the Zend Framework and CakePHP a little while back to share some of the thoughts and research he did to pick one over the other for his application.

A lot of people have been asking for some comparison articles for some of the popular frameworks. [...] Overall, both these frameworks are good to use as per your requirements. CakePHP is suitable for developers new to MVC and those who require stricter conventions. ZF is a choice for those who need better control over the application design and built-in support for renowned Web services. Both the frameworks are developing fast and the choice is entirely yours.

He includes brief overviews of each framework and comments on documentation and configuration issues surrounding them.

Commentors on the post include Nate Abele (of CakePHP) and Wil Sinclair (of the Zend Framework).

In response to this recent post on four reasons to hate CakePHP, Matt Curry has posted some of his thoughts over on his pseudocoder.com blog to refute the comments made.

I'm still bored and lacking posting ideas, so I figured I'd give a hyper-critical breakdown of "Four reasons to hate CakePHP" by A.J. Brown. Let's get right into it.

He responds to comments on: CakePHP's "heaviness", the (in)flexibility the framework allows, alpha releases, changes between versions, no namespace considerations and its use of global functions.

You can see the original post here: Four reasons to hate CakePHP as well as his AJ's own response to comments he recieved - Maybe I was too hard on CakePHP.

The CakePHP podcast, The Show, has posted their latest show for download - a look at what's to come in the latest release of the CakePHP framework (the stable 1.2):

On the day CakePHP 1.2 goes stable, Rafael Bandeira and Nate Abele chat about what you can expect when you go download your holiday package.

You can either download the file directly from the site or you can subscribe to their feed and get the latest shows pulled right into your aggregator.

In this recent blog entry Jani Hartikainen looks at the creation of generic actions for Zend Framework applications - methods that can be used to help eliminate code duplication:

Sometimes you will need nearly the same functionality in many actions. [...] There are several ways to deal with this, such as moving the code into a separate function, or an action helper. But in this post, I'm going to introduce so called "generic actions" - parametrized, easy to reuse actions - which is an idea similar to django generic views.

His example takes a generic action - one that grabs and output records from a table - and modifies it to take in parameters from the defining function as to which action/controller/model and ID to use. Then this action can be used over and over in multiple places without having to do any copy and paste coding.