Whats Cooking: Brownies, Red Velvet Cupcakes, Pizza

We’ve been having tons of fun over the last few weeks. If this post makes you hungry then I have succeeded.

Chocolate Brownies
These turned out perfect!

Red Velvet Cupcakes
We did half with Cream Cheese icing and half with traditional Waldorf-Astoria icing. They turned out pretty good but needed a tad bit more cocoa and the tops got a little crunchy.

Walnut and Artichoke Pizza
This pizza crust recipe is epic. Everything was made from scratch and no matter what you think: Walnuts and artichokes make an amazing pizza topper!

CakePHP SEO Plugin

I just wanted to quickly announce our new SEO Plugin for CakePHP. It provides an easy way to add SEO friendly URLs, page titles, and META fields to your CakePHP applications.

Installation

1. Add the MySQL table.

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `seo_seos` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `related_model_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `related_model_name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `title` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `description` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `keywords` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `slug` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `created` datetime NOT NULL,
  `modified` datetime NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`),
  KEY `related_model_id` (`related_model_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

This table will hold the SEO metadata for each model record.

2. Download the code and drop it in your /plugins directory. The code is readily available at GitHub.

3. Add the fields to your forms

	<fieldset>
		<legend>SEO</legend>
	<?php
		if ($this->action == 'admin_edit') {
			echo $form->input('Seo.id');
		}
		echo $form->input('Seo.slug');
		echo $form->input('Seo.title');
		echo $form->input('Seo.description');
		echo $form->input('Seo.keywords');
	?>
	</fieldset>

4. Add the preparation code to beforeRender() in AppController.

	function beforeRender() {
		$this->SearchEngineOptimizer->prepare();
	}

5. Add Seo.Seo to your $actsAs array in desired models or AppModel. Warning: Seo.Seo MUST come BEFORE Containable.

var $actsAs = array('Seo.Seo', 'Containable');

6. Add Seo.SearchEngineOptimizer to your $components array in AppController.

var $components = array('Auth', 'Seo.SearchEngineOptimizer');

7. Add $seo_for_layout to your /views/layouts/default.ctp (or whichever layout files you are using). It should look something like the following.

	<title>
		<?php echo $title_for_layout; ?> :: <?php echo Configure::read('website.general.name') . ' :: ' . Configure::read('Application.name'); ?>
	</title>
	<?php echo $seo_for_layout; ?>

8. Finally, add routes to make your URLs extra sexy. For example:

Router::connect('/recipes/*', array('controller' => 'recipes', 'action' => 'view'));

This should allow you to hit: http://mydomain.example/recipes/my-recipe-slug

Enjoy! Please let me know what I did wrong and what I did right. Suggestions and critiques are always welcome!

CakePHP ECommerce Company Considers Opening Source Code

Mocha Shopping Cart, the leader in CakePHP eCommerce, is currently considering the move to open source. We want to give back to the CakePHP community for all that they have given us. At this time, we are very new to the open source business model and trying to figure out how to make it work. First and foremost, we need to see some traffic and interest before such a decision would ever be made. If you have not had a chance to try Mocha Shopping Cart feel free to sign up for a FREE beta developer account or a FREE stable account and let us know how you feel about it.

Stay tuned for more updates!

Whats Cooking: Chocolate Chip Cookies, Cornbread Stuffing

As all of you Canadians know, it is now Canadian Thanksgiving and it was time to cook up some good eats. Tonight the wife and I tried a good chocolate chip cookie recipe and made cornbread for tomorrows cornbread stuffing. Both recipes were a huge success and here are some pics to prove it!

Update Oct 12, 2009
Probably the first time I have had chicken this tender (it fell apart in my mouth!). Dinner was a success

Marinated vegetables (raw), Caramelized Onion and Cornbread stuffing, Roasted chicken, and home made chicken gravy.

Music Spotlight: Paramore

I recently downloaded Paramore’s new album Brand New Eyes off of PirateBay (*gasp!*). Needless to say, I was impressed and I am now going to go out and buy the album to support them. It was the first I have heard of Paramore and I am really liking their stuff. Who said piracy was bad?

“Ignorance” by Paramore

CakePHP eCommerce Done Right: Mocha Shopping Cart

A few months back I posted on CakePHP eCommerce and the lack of good solutions. Well that is now no longer the case. I would like to be one of the first people to introduce you to Mocha Shopping Cart. We have been working day and night (literally) to come up with a solution for the small and medium sized business owners to sell their products online easily. We also have geared Mocha to be extend-able and easy for CakePHP designers and developers to add in their own twists for clients.

Mocha is written entirely in CakePHP and jQuery and is certainly the best CakePHP eCommerce app out there. Why do I say that?

Mocha Shopping Cart is…

• Fully hosted, secure, pre-installed
• Very easy to set up and configure
• Themable and Modular (Plug ins docs in the works)
• Works with most popular payment and shipping apis (UPS, USPS, Authorize.net, Paypal, etc.)
• Charges no transaction fees and no setup fees

If you still don’t believe me, Mocha is offering a limited time only Pre-Launch coupon code that gives you the first month FREE. You can try it for yourself and see how you like it. I think you will agree that it beats CakeCart and BakeSale, HANDS DOWN! And no, Mocha is not free (after the first 30 days). The costs help to speed up development, pay for server and hosting fees, and pay for that cup of coffee that us developers need when its 8 AM and we are having to talk with <insert_API_name_here> first thing in the morning.

Official Website: Mocha Shopping Cart
Blog with coupon code: Get a free trial of Mocha Shopping Cart