They talk (briefly) about how the call to the page is passed off to the controller's action and how you can get more information into it via POSTed values.

There's also a look at redirection, from action to action in a controller (or even to another one) and a look at a very handy method of sharing functions between the child controllers - a "master" parent controller (in their case, AppController).

At the end, they throw in a bit about components - module and reusable bits of functionality that can be passed around from controller to controller, action to action.

This series of articles are excerpts from the Packt book CakePHP Application Development.

With Solar, you connect to SQL databases using the Solar_Sql factory class, which returns a Solar_Sql_Adapter class for you. Most developers only need to connect to a single MySQL server. [...] However, when you get into a situation where you need to scale up, you might need a replicated MySQL database setup. In such cases, there is one "master" server that handles reads and writes, and there are one or more "slave" servers that are read-only.

The Solar_Sql_Adapter_MysqlReplicated adapter does all of the switching for you, making it as simple as dropping it in and changing your configuration to point to the master and slave servers (examples included).

• Use PHP Only When You Need it - Rasmus Lerdorf
• Use Many Tables With PHP and MYSQL for Scalability - Matt Mullenweg
• Never, ever trust your users - Dave Child
• Invest in PHP Caching - Ben Balbo
• Speed up PHP Development with an IDE, Templates and Snippets - Chad Kieffer
• Make Better Use of PHP's Filter Functions - Joey Sochacki
• Use a PHP Framework - Josh Sharp
• Don't use a PHP Framework - Rasmus Lerdorf
• Use Batch Processing - Jack D. Herrington
• Turn on Error Reporting Immediately - David Cummings

Some of them are conflicting, but that just means that you'll have to do what you've always done - take advice with a grain of salt and ultimately decide what's best for you and your application.

For the past four years, I have put a lot of work into executing a strategic plan that is tangentially connected with our conferences. [...] Instead [of trying to force interaction], I decided to try and slowly steer things in a direction that would have made our conferences closer to a family reunion than a dry business meetup.

He mentions the steps in his "evil plan" (for conference domination?) - community participation, setting the right atmosphere for the exchange of ideas, the oh-so-secret choosing of the speakers and their leadership by example through participation with the speakers and other conference goers.

The option, 'All' has won hands-down with a majority of 20.6%. A contradicting result is seen as next to 'All' is the option 'None' with 12.7% votes. The third position goes to 'easy install and works with your existing board' as it has garnered 4.8% votes. The last on the list is 'topic URLS are dynamically converted to SEO friendly addresses' which has got a dismal 0.0%.

Be sure to check out this week's poll too - it asks for votes on which of the options is the most important feature of PHP 5. Options include "Better error handling", "Newer useful functions", and "Best OOP support period".

I was discussing things with my brother the other day and I came up with a problem which he helped name. I'm currently maintaining some code, and it's quite a jumble. One of the things I can tell is that one of my predecessors began adding new sections of code to clean up the logic in other areas of the code. However, what never happened was the clean up of the old code, so now there's two places where the same set of data is retrieved in different ways.

He proposes the name "Multi Master Data" for the situation - two different sources, living in the same code, doing the same thing. Of course, he also mentions a situation where this type of problem can cause real issues, especially when trying to track down a bug (a bang your head on the desk moment).