A quick tip to get your forms to play nice with admin routing:

/views/users/edit.ctp

<?php echo $form->create("User", array("url" => $html->url(array("admin" => true), true))) ?>

Why? For some reason, $form->create() ignores the usual routing prefix attribute ("admin"=>true) so you have to pass the url through $html->url() which does take prefix routing into account.

Took me a little while to work this out so I'm blogging it here in the hopes it will help someone in the future:

Need to Contain your Paginated data?

in your controller:

$this->paginate = array(
	"contain"=>array(
		// usual contain array
	)
);
 
$this->set("data", $this->paginate("Model"));

For example, to bring back and paginate a User (id, first_name, last_name) and their Title (Mr, Mrs, etc.):

/app/users_controller.php

One of the neet features of CakePHP's scaffolding is that it automatically populates your foreign key (belongsTo, hasAndBelongsToMany) fields in your forms.

Lets take a look at a simple example to illustrate this:

app/models/article.php:

class Article extends AppModel {
	var $hasAndBelongsToMany = array(
		"Tag"
	);
}

app/models/tag.php:

Next Wednesday (ironically April 1st) I'll be doing a short (30 minute) presentation about the CakePHP framework to the good people at Sheffield GeekUp.

This is the first time I've ever done a 'proper' (ie. one that was planned and prepared) presentation and as you might expect I'm a bit jittery.