Smashing Magazine, for all their “Top 10″ and “Best 50″ articles, continues to occasionally post very helpful and mind-bending articles about Design and Production.

Their newest article about CSS is aimed at the CSS beginner, but has a few tricks that I wasn’t even aware of.

Floating and Overflow

The first, I want to point out is something that has always bugged me: the fact that a floated image is not completely contained within its parent container. Apparently this can be fixed simply by adding overflow:hidden to the div (autoflow:auto also works).

Floating and Double Margins (ie6 Bug)

Additionally, Internet Explorer 6 seems to double the margin of floated elements. So your 5px margin becomes 10px in IE6, and is the cause of all of my perfectly aligned floating divs crashing to the ground when I test the page in IE6 (grumble grumble hate hate)

This is also easy to fix: just add display: inline to your floated element.

.floated_element {
     float: left;
     width: 200px;
     margin: 5px;
     display: inline; /*--IE6 workaround--*/
     }

Deserves a once-over

There were alot of other great tips and points that even seasoned CSS-ers should look at — you never know when you might find something new, or an easy way to do something you had been futzing with. If you get a chance, it’s definitely worth a look.

Did you know that CakePHP automatically caches a lot of your data so that you don’t have to call (for example) model references over and over again? Isn’t that nice?

Did you know that if you make a change to your database (for example: adding a column) and the caches haven’t been updated, it will neither SAVE nor RETRIEVE any data relating to those changes?

Did you know that cake won’t tell you that your models might be out of date, and that you can easily waste 2-3 HOURS of your life on something stupid like that?

Do yourself a favor: When you change your database, delete EVERYTHING in app\tmp\cache\models

And thankyou for the heads up, Snook.ca

Just a quicky:

I was looking for some good syntax-highlighting plugins for WordPress, but so many of them were hard to use, required configuration or just plain mangled my code.

So then I found Syntax Highlighter Evolved. Set it up in 5 minutes, easy as pie to use, and no more code mangling. Definitely recommended.

Syntax Highlighter Evolved is recommended by some guy in Japan!

Now that’s a tagline that will sell products if I ever heard one!

So, as I as spent half the day today working on getting my “Remember Me” function to work, I figured it would be a good thing to share with the rest of the world, so that they didn’t have to ever EVER put up with the kind of stuff I went through today.

So, first of all, we all know what a remember me function is, right?

Yup, that's it (Wordpress)

And there it is again (google)

The “Remember me” function is a little checkbox that the user checks when they log in so that they don’t have to bother logging in again as long as they keep visiting the site every XX days where XX is the number of days that the site will remember them for.

Sounds easy! Let’s do it in cake!

Great idea! Cake should make it super easy! And if you search for cake and remember me functions, a lot (or rather a lot of variations based around 2 or 3 guys’ code) of sites will pop up. I personally recommend the RememberMe component from the Neutrino CMS, as it’s small, lightweight and doesn’t take much configuring. (And don’t believe the page that comes up when you enter “CakePHP rememberme” into google. That’s what got me off on the wrong foot)

And if you plan on something really simple with your site (i.e. logged in or not logged in) then it’s really easy to set up.

1. Get the component that you’re going to use (I used RememberMe)
2. Plop it in the components.
3. Set your references to it in your users/login function, and
4. (The most important part) attach the component’s cookie checking function to the app_controller’s beforeRender function.

Now, why’s the last step the most important? Because the “remember me” cookie needs to be checked for every time a page is visited, otherwise it can’t do it’s job. The first version of the remember me code I had used when I first started CakePHP had the cookie management in the users/login function. Like this:

function login() {
//-- code inside this function will execute only when autoRedirect was set to false (i.e. in a beforeFilter).
if ($this->Auth->user()) {
if (!empty($this->data) && $this->data['User']['remember_me']) {
$cookie = array();
$cookie['username'] = $this->data['User']['username'];
$cookie['password'] = $this->data['User']['password'];
$this->Cookie->write('Auth.User', $cookie, true, '+2 weeks');
unset($this->data['User']['remember_me']);
}
$this->redirect($this->Auth->redirect());
}
if (empty($this->data)) {
$cookie = $this->Cookie->read('Auth.User');
if (!is_null($cookie)) {
if ($this->Auth->login($cookie)) {
//  Clear auth message, just in case we use it.
$this->Session->del('Message.auth');
$this->redirect($this->Auth->redirect());
} else { // Delete invalid Cookie
$this->Cookie->del('Auth.User');
}
}
}
}

Makes perfect sense, right?

NO

The problem is that users/login only gets called when there’s a login to be processed (which is not explained very well in the documentation). This becomes a problem when you are using the Auth->allow() array to let people access parts of the site, and not others. (Even more of a problem when the same page has different data for logged in and non-logged in users)

What happens is that since the action is allowed, Cake decides that there’s no reason to check for a login, so even if the login cookie exists, it doesn’t get checked because the Users/Login function never gets called.

So, in most cases, this is not a problem — just put the RememberMe->check() function into the AppController’s beforeRender — but what if you want do something more after a user logs in? Something like increasing their login count, setting login time, getting info about them, etc etc.

Custom Functions and Remember Me

Most RememberMe components and solutions have a provision for callbacks after a successful cookie login (much like isAuthorized) however (also like isAuthorized) the function has to be in either:

• The AppController
• The Current Controller

Because the component only has access to the controller that’s currently calling it, you’re confined to either the code in the AppController or the currently viewed controller. And if your current controller is Articles (because your user is looking at an article) then we can’t directly access the users controller to run our little _after_login function. (With Models you can get to from almost anywhere in your code through skillful use of relations, but Controllers are a bit trickier)

So, what do we do? We take a little hint from the cake library, and use the wonderful App:import function to forcibly bring the Controller to us. Now this is an expensive call, because it’s essentially ringing up an entire new controller with all its associated models, et al. So we need to be sure to do this only when the user is logging in through a cookie. That way, it’ll only happen once for the user’s session, and we can quickly get rid of its memory-eating load on the next page view.

So, let’s look at some code:

The Original RememberMe component

<?php
class RememberMeComponent extends Object
{
var $components = array('Auth', 'Cookie');
var $controller = null;

/**
* Cookie retention period.
*
* @var string
*/
var $period = '+2 weeks';
var $cookieName = 'User';

function startup(&$controller)
{
$this->controller =& $controller;
}

function remember($username, $password)
{
$cookie = array();
$cookie[$this->Auth->fields['username']] = $username;
$cookie[$this->Auth->fields['password']] = $password;
$this->Cookie->write($this->cookieName, $cookie, true, $this->period);
}

function check()
{
$cookie = $this->Cookie->read($this->cookieName);

if (!is_array($cookie) || $this->Auth->user())
return;

if ($this->Auth->login($cookie))
{
$this->Cookie->write($this->cookieName, $cookie, true, $this->period);
}
else
{
$this->delete();
}
}

function delete()
{
$this->Cookie->del($this->cookieName);
}
}

?>

So, this check function has got to go

We need to be able to load the UsersController so that we can get to our _post_login() function to do all our login magic like checking how the user’s subscription is going, how long many times they’ve logged in, etc.

function check()
{
// If you want to change the cookie name, change it here
$this->Cookie->name = 'rememberme';
$cookie = $this->Cookie->read($this->cookieName);

if (!is_array($cookie) || $this->Auth->user())
return;

if ($this->Auth->login($cookie))
{
$this->Cookie->write($this->cookieName, $cookie, true, $this->period);
if (!App::import('Controller', 'Users')) {
return false;
}
$className = 'UsersController';
$Ctrl =& new $className();
$Ctrl->constructClasses();
$Ctrl->_post_login($this->Auth->user('id'));
}
else
{
$this->delete();
}
}

So, here’s my code as it stands now. What I’ve done is if there is a cookie, and you can successfully login with said cookie (Through $this->Auth->login($cookie) ) then we’re going to spin up the Controller called Users through the App:import function. If it can’t load, then we return false, but if it DOES load, then we create a new Controller and construct it so that we can then call our post_login script with the Auth->user Info. Everything else is set up just how the instructions on the RememberMe Component Page say.

Conclusion

Getting a RememberMe function working in CakePHP really isn’t that difficult, but the problem (like a lot of CakePHP) is that the signal-to-noise ratio of those who know what they’re doing and those that don’t is incredibly high. I don’t profess to have all the answers, but hopefully just some of the problems that I’ve had will help others who are struggling with the same issues.

Till next time!

So here I am starting my first foray into the world of blogging.

I’ve never been much into blogging, even though I have to my credit: a livejournal page, a shared facebook account, a mixi account, a blogger account, and whatever microsoft was using for their blog system 2 years ago.

Suffice it to say none of these have ever been really updated with anything resembling regularity.

But I’m hoping that this blog will be a bit different. I’ve been inspired (or beaten around the head, whichever way you want to look at it) by my friend who runs BingoCardcreator.com and is also the owner of the increasingly popular small business blog MicroISV on a Shoestring which in fact was so popular that he even got interviewed for a book called Blog Blazers (Which I have a copy of, but still have never read).

In any case, he started out with the dream of making bingo cards for English Teachers in Japan, and got sucked in to the wonderful world of website optimizations and internet marketing. He’s surprisingly done very well for himself almost to the point that he makes about as much as I do at my day job by selling bingocards to school teachers.  Part of me is always glad that he chose to focus his diabolic marketing energy into something like bingocards instead of say, world domination, otherwise we’d all by singing hail to the Patrick.

So, back to the main point, I took his idea and decided to try my hand at some marketing / site-design and try to learn some new systems that I never knew before. The experience has completely changed the way that I view programming and design. Bingocard Creator is run off of RubyOnRails, the newest-and-greatest technology to ever hit the web (apparently), but as I am a dyed-in-the-wool PHP programmer I decided to try and find some sort of framework that could match the “it just works” methodology of RubyOnRails while not leaving my comfortable niche of PHP.

After checking out a lot of frameworks, I finally settled on CakePHP which is a framework for PHP based on RubyOnRails. It took a lot of getting used to, but a few months later, I feel that I am fully confident to actually use CakePHP for projects in the future, and hopefully erase some of the evil code that plagues my main site ( Ippatsu @ JapaneseTesting.com ) in future upgrades.

So, after a long and windy introduction, I lay out the purpose of this blog:

To share with anyone else who is thinking of making their own CMS-based site, the trials, tribulations and resources that helped me to get my site up and running.

Essentially I’ll be sharing programming tricks that I’ve found, marketing ideas, design resources, etc. Pretty much anything that I think that’s useful to people trying to make their own site.