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I’ve been working on a new project and have been moving a lot of my programming to the cakephp framework.

I needed a menu that was dynamic I wanted it to show the Login and Register Buttons when someone is not logged in and just the oppisite when they are logged in I want to show the Logout and MyAccounts button.

I found that the best way to do this is to create a helper to display the menu.

To accomplish this we need to build our files.

We are going to use a componet to house the basic menu.

This will go in the /apps/controllers/components/menu.php

——————————————————————

<?php
class MenuComponent extends Object {
    var $components = array(’Session’);
 
    function startup() {
         
        $user = $this->Session->read(’User’);
 
        //menus array
        $menus = array();
        $menus[__('Home', true)] = ”;
        $menus[__('Twitter Accounts', true)] = ‘accounts/view’;
        $menus[__('RSS Your Tweets', true)] = ”;
        $menus[__('Tweet Scheduler', true)] = ”;
       
        if (!$this->Session->check(’User’)){
            $menus[__('Register', true)] = ‘users/register’;
            $menus[__('Login', true)] = ‘users/login’;
        }else{
            $menus[__('MyAccount', true)] = ‘users/account’;
            $menus[__('Logout', true)] = ‘users/logout’;       
        }
        $this->Session->write(’Menu.main’, $menus);
    }
}
?>

——————————————————————-

Basically this creates an array of your menu and saves it to the current session. Also included are the language hooks incase you want to display this in a different language.

Next we need to build our helper. The helper will go in the

/apps/views/helpers/menu.php

——————————————————————–

<?php
/**
 * Dynamic menu  helper library.
 *
 * Methods to render dynamic menu .
 */
class MenuHelper extends AppHelper {
 
    var $helpers = array(’Html’);
 
    /**
     * Render  menu from session variable array.
     * Top item of the array is menu caption and div id
     * Sub items are  menu items caption and link to the location, or array of subitems.
     *
     * @param array $menu Name of the session variable that stores menu array.
     * @static
     */
    function render($menu = null) {
        $out = ”;
       
        foreach($menu as $caption => $link) {
            $out = $out.’<li><a href=”‘.$this->webroot.$link.’” target=”_self” title=”‘.$caption.’”><span>’.$caption.’</span></a></li>’;
        }
        $out = ‘<ul>’.$out.’</ul>’;
        $out = $this->Html->div(’menu’, $out);
        return $out;
    }
}
?>

———————————————————————————————————-

The helper parses the array and builds the menu structure.

Next we need to add the following to our apps_controller.

/cake/libs/controller/app_controller.php

You need to make sure that our helper and our component are available to all of our pages.

The code will look similar to this:

class AppController extends Controller {
    var $helpers = array(’Form’,'Javascript’,'Html’,'Menu’);
    var $components = array(’Menu’);
}

You will need to add the following line to your /apps/views/default.php

<?php echo $menu->render($session->read(’Menu.main’)); ?>

This will call the render function in the helper and display the menu.

Now in order for the menu  to look right you will need images and a CSS stylesheet for the menu.

Remember in CakePHP you place your .CSS files in the apps/webroot/css directory.

to include that into your page you need to use the cake html function.

Like this:

<?php echo $html->css(’style’); ?>

The CSS file will need the following:

.menu {
    float:left;
    background:#FFFFFF;
    height: 27px;
    width: 901px;
    position: absolute;
    left: 204px;
    top: 213px;
    font-size:93%;
    line-height:normal;
    font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
    font-weight: bold;
    border-right-width: 1px;
    border-bottom-width: 1px;
    border-left-width: 1px;
    border-right-style: none;
    border-bottom-style: solid;
    border-left-style: none;
    border-right-color: #000000;
    border-bottom-color: #000000;
    border-left-color: #000000;
    }

.menu ul {
    margin:0;
    padding:0px 0px 0 3px;
    list-style:none;
    }
.menu li {
    display:inline;
    margin:0;
    padding:0;
    }
.menu a {
    float:left;
    background:url(”../img/tableftF.gif”) no-repeat left top;
    margin:0;
    padding:0 0 0 4px;
    text-decoration:none;
    }
.menu a span {
    float:left;
    display:block;
    background:url(”../img/tabrightF.gif”) no-repeat right top;
    padding:5px 15px 4px 6px;
    color:#666;
    }
   
/* Commented Backslash Hack hides rule from IE5-Mac \*/
.menu a span {float:none;}
/* End IE5-Mac hack */
.menu a:hover span {color:#FFFFFF;}
.menu a:hover {background-position:0% -42px;}
.menu a:hover span {background-position:100% -42px;}

All that is left is you will need the following two images and place them in the /apps/webroot/img directory.

Image 1

Image 2

That’s it…

If you like this please leave a comment. It helps to motivate me to share other great tips.

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As a php programmer I have become fond of the CakePHP framework. For this reason I have always used an easy installer for Apache, MySQL, and PHP.

XAMPP has become my favorite as it has matured over the years and works quite well under a windows platform.

When I decided to give the new Windows 7 a try I found a very strange problem. The Windows kernal is using port 80. Because of this when you go to install XAMPP apache will fail to load.

The simple fix for this is to run apache on port 8080.

To do this you go to your XAMPP directory in the apache configuration files.

c:\xampp\apache\conf

You will need to edit the file httpd.conf

In the file you will find the Listen section and you will need to change it to listen on the local host ip address 127.0.0.1 on port 8080

It should look like this:

LISTEN 127.0.0.1:8080

Then you need to scroll down and find the server name section. You will need to change it to Local Host and port 8080.

It should look like this:

ServerName localhost:8080

Save the file then restart your computer.

When you open XAMPP control panel you should see that your services are running.

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