I have been working on a new (post-markdown) markup language Carve. And I wanted to know how it performs for input and output. Especially compared to Markdown and Djot, which mainly inspired me here. And it happens that Pandoc released 3.10.2 recently. Everyone who converts documents knows the proce...

One Source, Ten Surfaces Every Shopware shop hits the same wall eventually. You need rich text somewhere the core doesn’t give you a WYSIWYG - a category landing blurb, a brand story on the manufacturer, a formatted paragraph inside a shipping mail - and you’re left with two bad options. Paste raw H...

<!– wp:carve/markup {"carve":"Markdown won because it disappears: you write text, and the markup stays out of your way. But anyone who has used it for real documents knows where it stops disappearing - the moment you need a table with a merged cell, a numbered figure, a citation, or just the string ...

CakePHP 5.4.0-RC2 just dropped. The final 5.4.0 will follow shortly, so now is the time to pull the release candidate into your apps and surface any regressions while they are still cheap to fix. This post highlights the changes that are...

Most applications eventually need a lightweight way for users to respond to content. A single like button works for some flows, ratings work for others, but there is a useful space in between: reactions. The dereuromark/cakephp-reactions plugin adds that layer to CakePHP applications. It...

For years, running PHPStan at level 8 on a CakePHP app meant making peace with a wall of missingType.generics and missingType.iterableValue warnings, or quietly silencing them in ignoreErrors. The ORM knew the entity type. The query knew its result type....

Every CakePHP project I've ever opened has the same file. It's called something like MenuHelper.php or Navigation.php, it lives somewhere in src/View/Helper/, and it grows a new if ($this->request->getParam('controller') === ...) branch every quarter. By the time anyone notices, the...

… and how we automated it in CakePHP Most security incidents do not start with a genius attacker. They start with an honest person who found something and could not figure out how to tell you. If reporting a bug is harder than...

A clean v2 API is coming dereuromark/cakephp-fixture-factories just shipped 2.0.0 RC. After a year of incremental cleanup — typed persistEntity() / persistEntities(), the TEntity template on BaseFactory, redirected deprecations — the next major was the right moment to redesign the surface...

The cakephp-audit-stash plugin has grown a lot of new surface between 1.x and the current 2.0. What started out as a behavior that records entity-level CRUD into an audit_logs table is now a full mini-app for observability: custom action events...

And This Time It Grew Up Remember CakePHP 2’s ACL? The ACO/ARO trees, the aros_acos join table, the tutorial that taught a whole generation of us what “hierarchical permissions” even meant? That was a big idea for its time — permissions...

The problem: env(’REMOTE_ADDR’) Do not use env('REMOTE_ADDR') or low level env() wrapper directly. Those are always the direct TCP connection source, not necessarily the real IP. Make sure to always use ServerRequest::clientIp() when interacting with the user’s IP address. When you move a...

A Complete Guide to php-collective/toml TOML has gained traction as a configuration format. Rust’s Cargo, Python’s pyproject.toml, and various CLI tools use it. For PHP projects that need to read or write TOML files, php-collective/toml provides a modern parser and encoder...

How two plugins work together to bring enterprise-grade data integrity to your CakePHP application The Problem: Who Changed What, and Should They Have? Every application that handles important data eventually faces the same questions: “Who deleted that customer record last week?” “Can we undo...

Zero Reflection, Zero Regrets Every PHP developer knows the pain. You’re deep in a template, staring at $data['user']['address']['city'], wondering if that key actually exists or if you’re about to trigger a notice that’ll haunt your logs forever. DTOs solve this. But the...

Breaking Free from Google Maps: Modern Open-Source Alternatives for CakePHP. Almost 20 years ago I started to work with GoogleMaps already. Then slowly also Geocoding and other tooling was added. It all was grouped together into a useful and popular Geo...

Compact CLI output If you are a nerd like me, you probably appreciate my recent 5.3 addition of a more concise default output of available commands. It already reduced scrolling by a lot, compared to before (which is now -v). But for prod/staging,...

If you’ve ever wished Markdown was a bit more consistent and feature-rich, you’ll want to hear about Djot - and now there’s a complete PHP implementation available. What is Djot? Djot is a lightweight markup language by the author of Commonmark (Markdown)...

Meet the New FileStorage Plugin A Modern File Storage Solution for CakePHP. Remember when handling file uploads in PHP meant wrestling with $_FILES, manually moving uploaded files, hardcoding paths throughout your application, and hoping nothing breaks when you need to move files...

More than 5 years ago I mentioned it as a side topic. Now I want to showcase it with fresh look and feel and lots of more useful tooling. The TestHelper plugin It now ships with its own default standalone template. That makes it...

Healthchecks / Uptime With increasing complexity of apps and more and more requirements on your server and tooling, it can be easily overlooked, when doing updates or migrating servers. I highly recommend a way to track your requirements. Some are easier verified, e.g....

You most likely have read my previous posts that go into detail regarding CakePHP and how to be most efficient in the IDE, as well as most “type safe” using PHPStan and static analyzing. See e.g. here. In this post I...

There is a new CakePHP session authenticator on the block. Status quo Historically, the Session provider in CakePHP 3.x times using the AuthComponent stored an array of your user (entity) in the session upon login. It was accessed using Auth.User, so Auth.User.id was...

DB tools Some useful database commands have been added to Setup plugin 3.8.0+: bin/cake db init This will create the (default) database, if it does not yet exist. Setting up a fresh project or local version of it, the dev tool might not do...