The Bakery Everything CakePHP

Nice article, seems very thorough. Just a quick comment to point out that some extra spacing seems to have been introduced into your code. There are 29 occurrences of ` -> `. :)

This code should fix the problems mentioned by Rafael:

Controller Class:

<?php 
    function index($searchText = null) {
        // redirect when search text is posted
        if (isset($this->data['Model']['search_text'])) {
            return $this->redirect(array('id' => $this->data['Model']['search_text']));
        }
        // setup search conditions (if any)
        $conditions = null;
        if ($searchText) {
            $conditions = array('or' => array(
                'Model.field LIKE'   => '%' . $searchText . '%',
                'Model.field_2 LIKE' => '%' . $searchText . '%', 
                'Model.field_3 LIKE' => '%' . $searchText . '%', 
                'Model.field_4 LIKE' => '%' . $searchText . '%', 
                'Model.field_5 LIKE' => '%' . $searchText . '%',
            ));
        }
        // set data for view
        $this->Model->recursive = 0;
        $model = $this->paginate('Model', $conditions);
        $this->set(compact('model'));
    }
?>
Bear in mind that this implementation performs an "exact phrase" search. One could have an "all words" search by splitting $searchText on spaces and generating a larger $conditions array.

Nice work!

Are you planning to add proxy support?

This behavior is great, but I can only use it to access web services hosted on our internal network, therefore it is not as useful as it could be in its current state.

I ran the test case and got 17/17 fails since I can't access cakephp.org without going through a proxy. :)

I know you intended to remove any external dependencies, but proxy support is easily accomplished using cURL. For example, I had planned to replace the need for the following code:

Model Class:

<?php 
    if (!function_exists('curl_init')) {
        die('PHP CURL library not enabled. (Uncomment extension=php_curl.dll in php.ini)');
    }

    $requestURL = $this->requestURL . '?' . http_build_query($params);

    $ch = curl_init();
    $options = array(
        CURLOPT_URL => $requestURL,
        CURLOPT_PROXY => 'proxy.example.com',
        CURLOPT_PROXYPORT => '8080',
        CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true);
    curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
    $body = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    //pr($body);
?>
I don't know how easy this is to implement without using cURL, as I have never tried, but just thought I would make you aware of this slight downfall. :)