The Bakery Everything CakePHP

This helper is for sites with high traffic pages that have nothing unique about the user on the page. I use this helper on http://www.rsstalker.com. It handles the custom RSS feeds (currently around 13k), which is perfect since there is nothing user specific in the XML. Each feed gets hit multiple times a day, by multiple aggregators. This really adds up to a ton of requests.

Limitations

• Nothing specific to a user on the page. No "Welcome, Matt" or shopping carts.
• Cache will never expire. See below for workaround.

Download the helper at http://github.com/mcurry/cakephp/tree/master/helpers/html_cache or copy and paste from below to /app/views/helpers/html_cache.php.

Helper Class:

Download code <?php 
/*
 * HTML Cache CakePHP Helper
 * Copyright (c) 2008 Matt Curry
 * www.PseudoCoder.com
 * http://github.com/mcurry/cakephp/tree/master/helpers/html_cache
 * http://www.pseudocoder.com/archives/2008/09/03/cakephp-html-cache-helpercakephp-html-cache-helper/
 *
 * @author      Matt Curry <matt@pseudocoder.com>
 * @license     MIT
 *
 */

class HtmlCacheHelper extends Helper {
  function afterLayout() {
    $view =& ClassRegistry::getObject('view');
    $path = WWW_ROOT . implode(DS, array_filter(explode('/', $this->here)));

    $file = new File($path, true);
    $file->write($view->output);
  }
}
?>

Expiring The Cache

To expire the cache I use a cron job which deletes old files from the directory.
Download code
find /full/path/to/app/webroot/controller/ -mmin +360 | xargs rm -f


Notes

The cached files are getting written right to your webroot. The default Cake .htaccess checks to see if a file actually exists, this is what allows images, js, css, and other files to be handled directly by the web server.

This won't work with the root file of your controller. So for example www.rsstalker.com/feeds won’t work, but www.rsstalker.com/feeds/amazon does.