Padraic Brady is on part five of his series looking at making a blogging tool with the Zend Framework today. This time he focuses on the database side of things, working with models and making an admin module.

First of all I decided to add an Entries Model and Authors Model to the mix, primarily to get ready for when we can add new entries to our blog. This leads to where we can create new Entries; we add an Administration Module to the application with it's own distinct Layout.

He starts by making the database schema, an entries and authors table, before starting in on the models. They're made based off of the Zend_Db component's structure and they let the application interact with the data in the tables easily. His code for the modules is included as well as the controller and view for the admin module.

Hasin Hayder has posted another in his series looking at the relatively young PHP framework, orchid. HE digs a little deeper this time and looks at the Model functionality it has.

As promised, orchid comes with real flexibility which lets you design your application in less time. [...] In this installment, we will learn how to achieve maximum speed and benefit by using the built-in model library of orchid with a toppings of the active record library.

He shows how to connect to the database backend through the framework (along with some dos and don'ts) and how to pull this connection into the Model functionality. His example inserts information into a "comics" table and shows how to pull it back out (with a call to the find() method).

Chris Hartjes has posted about a topic, while not new in the PHP community it seems to have resurfaced more lately - how MVC is implemented (or not implemented) in most of the PHP-based Rails-esque frameworks.

This guy [making comments at PHP London] apparently works for the Agavi project. [...] The comments for that [reddit] post are really interesting too, as people take their usual swipes at PHP, and CakePHP, and the Symfony guys come out in droves to talk up Symfony, and on and on it goes. Sadly, this is not a unique occurance on the web.

Chris took a closer look at Agavi to see what made its MVC so special - only to find that it just does it different, but not necessarily "right" (he includes a code example to illustrate). He also quotes Wikipedia's definition of an MVC framework and notes that CakePHP seems to fit it to a tee.

The Bakery has posted four new articles/components today bringing you more CakePHP goodness for your consumption:

• Color Helper (Random) - Need a way to distinguish one chunk from another? How about easy random background colors that are all within a reasonable range of values that look good with dark text.
• Model Loader - This component helps you to load your models on the fly ( I mean in your actions, whenever).
• InotImg - helper for reducing rows in view - When I was playing with images I always messed up with stuff which didn't belongs into view code. Like "if is_file(image" etc. but I want to be sure that there is going to be an image whether wanted or empty-image, so I wrote a following helper to make things easier.
• CakeSWXPHP - SWX is the native data format for Flash. It uses SWF files to store and exchange data. It is also an implementation of an RPC gateway (currently in PHP), tools (a data analyzer/debugger and a service explorer), various APIs (Flickr, Twitter, etc.), and an ActionScript library that make creating data driven Flash and Flash Lite applications a piece of cake.

Be sure to check out the rest of the great content on The Bakery for even more CakePHP-ness.