The Bakery Everything CakePHP

Introduction

The Tools and Libraries

• VirtualBox
  VirtualBox is one of the most popular virtual machine software, and it's free and open sourced. I used VirtualBox to install ubuntu 9.0.4 on my desktop pc with runs win7. It provides the easy way to have different OSs on a single computer.
• Ubuntu 9.0.4 desktop
  The famous open source linux system, which is similar to Debian. It's easy to install and manage, especially usefully for development.
• XAMPP
  XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. With XAMPP, I can built up my develop environment very quickly. You can get it from http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html.
  
• Notepad++
  The very popular free editor runs on windows systems. It's my most favorite editor for php.
• 
  CakePHP framework
  
  

  Learning CakePHP

  Thanks to the CakePHP team. Thanks for their great work of the framework and wonderful documentations. These are the great places to get the knowledge from:
  * CookBook.
  I study to use CakePHP step by step following the CookBook, it leads me into the world of CakePHP.
  
  * Articles and Case Studies
  These great articles and cases show the conception of CakePHP programming.
  
  * Questions area
  I can get answers here when I have problems.
  
  

  The work

  After getting prepared, it's time to work.
  
  Mockups First of all, create plain html pages to show the layouts. And creating images and css files for the pages.
  
  Define models For these project, there is not so many models. But I need to define the structure of very model and relationships between these models.
  
  Coding controllers This is the actual step of coding work, I need to modify models, views and controllers to meet the real requirements. Views ware created based on the mockups which mentioned in "Mockups" section.
  
  Define Routines The is the the most difficult step to me. It took me 3 days to understand the routine mechanism.
  
  
  Test with browsers I just tested the website in browsers like: Firefox 3.x , IE7, IE8, Opera 9 and Google Chrome. I have 3 guest systems installed in VirtualBox. So it's easy to test with different environments and browsers.
  
  

  Challenge

  Because I'm using a VPS to host the webiste, the performance becomes very important. Finally, I made a choice on Nginx + PHP + Mysql. The key things is to convert .htaccess to nginx rewrite rules, after lots of research, I got it to work and the rewrite rules for nginx looks like
  .htaccess
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?url=$1 [QSA,L]
  convert to nginx
  location / {
  index index.php
  
  if (!-d $request_filename){
  set $rule_0 1$rule_0;
  }
  if (!-f $request_filename){
  set $rule_0 2$rule_0;
  }
  if ($rule_0 = "21"){
  rewrite ^(.*)$ /index.php?url=$1 last;
  }
  }
  
  
  
  

  The final result

  After 3 weeks work, the website is online now, it's available at http://www.popgames4u.com. I'd like to get feeds back from people:) .