It's been way to long since my last post. I've been busy at the 9-5 and also working on launching my first startup (Chooey.com).

I saw that Heroku allowed for PHP applications to now be deployed with their cedar stack setup. I thought I would give it a shot and see if I could get CakePHP running in the cloud. It only took me about 20 minutes of reading and tinkering before I got everything working perfectly.

I will be documenting CakePHP on Heroku with a simple blog I've set up at cakeblog.heroku.com. If you are interested take a look and if you have any questions feel free to give me a shout.

Check out Cake on Heroku!

Tonight we held Toronto's first CakePHP meetup (or so we think). I did a talk on RESTful web development with CakePHP and demoed building a RESTful application with CakePHP and consuming the REST API with CakePHP's built in HttpSocket class. Ryan White did a presentation on localization using the built in translate behaviour and I18n as well as caching in CakePHP.

I will keep you posted on future CakePHP meetups in the Toronto area.

Do you need to find out geological information out about users that use your web app? Look no further! This helper utilizes IPInfoDB's geolocation tools to find out geographical information about your users from their IP address.

Check out the CakePHP Geotargeting Helper

I just saw this on Twitter while doing a search for Croogo related news. It looks like Matt Curry has released a plugin that will migrate your Wordpress blog over to Croogo. I would give this a shot but I'm currently not running any Wordpress sites. This is great news for any CakePHP developer running a Wordpress blog looking to switch over to the CakePHP based Croogo.

Right now it looks like it migrates most data, but I would test it on a development server before you migrate your production blog.

Check out the plugin on Matt Curry's Github repo

Github is a great resource for any developer. Other developers are constantly publishing new code to Github but sometimes it's hard to find what you are looking for. I will attempt to find some of the better pieces of code hosted on Github for your CakePHP programming pleasure.

Matt Curry probably has one of the best selections of CakePHP code on Github. He has published components, datasources, helpers and plugins. I have used many of libraries in my work, most recently the chat plugin.

Neil Crookes also has some great code in his repository. He recently launched his searchable plugin for in site searching. He also has an accompanying blog post with instructions on how to use the searchable plugin.

Joel Moss has published probably the best migration system for CakePHP that works with YAML files. I have used it in many projects and it has saved me a lot of time setting up my databases. He also has named scope behavior which emulates named scope from Ruby on Rails.

Fabio Kreusch has published a CakePHP Newsletter Plugin that works quite well if you are looking to implement a newsletter into your CakePHP application.

Are you looking to add some ecommerce to your site? Take a look at Sam Anzaroot's CakeCart which is a shopping cart built ontop of CakePHP although he says it is currently in "pre-pre-alpha" stage it is a good place to start.

This is by no means a complete list, just some of the pieces of code I have found useful on Github. If there are any other interesting projects that you know of on Github leave the url in the comments.