After six weeks of microconfiguring .htaccess files and begging IRC’s #cakephp for help on inexplicably broken code, I had produced nothing of value. I am a patient man, but I expect some fruition from my studies. I am clearly not alone: my post about .htaccess files rocketed to the #2 spot on Google’s search for ‘htaccess cakephp’.

On Saturday morning I burned it all down, cleaned up the ashes, and started fresh with CodeIgniter, which has many similar qualities to CakePHP. Good news: it has a tiny footprint (one app is < 50kB) and no .htaccess files. Bad news: no AJAX helpers ((They’re working on it. In the meantime, do what I did and pick up jQuery.)), no templates, and CodeIgniter’s name makes inventing blog title gags nigh impossible. I’ll live.

To compare timeframes: In six weeks of study, I produced 10 lines of unjustifiably non-functioning code. In an hour and a half, I had CodeIgnite working with Eclipse (the small footprint helps) and had produced the test app CakePHP couldn’t handle. That’s 0.15% of the time.

Case in point. It took a week of research to pick up an important point: if any one of four .htaccess files are missing, bits of your CakePHP app will not work. Not might…will. For me, the symptom was broken CSS: the HREF in

pointed to nowhere, and nothing existed to forward it to a valid location.

Unfortunately .htaccess files tend to disappear easily, especially when manipulating directories. Filenames beginning with ‘.’ do not show up, so simple drag-and-drop operations from an operating system’s GUI leaves out .htaccess because you can’t see it.

Good news is in store, though. Working through this tutorial set me straight, and I have a flawless application once again.

Using Eclipse to maintain CakePHP projects is even worse. Precisely one tutorial exists, and it just doesn’t, um, cut the cake. It left me more confused than before I started.

After spending an hour on IRC’s #cakephp, one very patient user guided me through the process. By the end of the session, all I really needed was a visualisation of the setup. He took a desktop snap and sent it to me. Bam! Eclipse and CakePHP were together in five minutes.

In the interest of aiding visual learners out there and filling in the gaps left by the CakePHP/Eclipse tutorial, I pass this image on to you.

As the tutorial mentions, you will be creating two separate Eclipse projects: one for Cake core, and another for your project. Select everything inside /cake/cake and copy it into the core project; using /cake/cake as an include path works too. ((My biggest criticism yet of CakePHP: the developers didn’t spend any time thinking of the repercussions from naming a directory and its child the same thing.))

In your other project, use the core as an included project (right-click or whatever on Include Paths > Configure Include Path). Finally, select everything inside /cake/app and copy it into your project (again, including /cake/app is also valid).

That should work. If it doesn’t, feel free to comment below, though I’m likely to be of insufficient help. Otherwise, hum to yourself as you happily code away:

This was a triumph

I’m making a note here: ‘HUGE SUCCESS’…

Responses to comments after the jump…

Update: ryanb correctly notes that my criticism of poor directory naming choices was incorrect. I had unwisely named the directory containing the cake core the same thing, cake, creating the mind-numbing cake/cake. I managed to correct this a few weeks ago, but regretfully never edited out the misstatement from the blog. I sincerely apologise.

On the reverse side, ryanb does me injustice for blaming the developers for making a lousy tutorial. Never, in any step in the blogging process, did I link official CakePHP development with the tutorial. I did say the documentation is weak, and I did cite the tutorial, but I didn’t say the tutorial and the documentation were the same thing. The aesthetics of the official documentation and the roughness of the tutorial should be enough to differentiate the two. Admittedly a clarifying statement would have helped, but it never occured to me.