For all of you who have been looking at my proof of concept for joining the powers of CakePHP and Drupal there are good news: The project is coming along very nicely and I think within 1 or 2 weeks I'll be able to release the first Alpha version for public use.

So here are some of the things I've recently been working on:

Drupal Theme Integration

Well one of the first things I needed to work when I started this project was that my website could use a theme of drupal but use the rendered view of a controller to show up inside of it.
While this hasn't been to difficult there was something that recently started bugging me. It would be stupid if I couldn't use all the cool CakePHP stuff for views in my layouts now. Especially the lag of helpers was the one most important thing I'd miss. So ... how to fix this? Luckily Drupal has build-in support for costum theming librariers (most notably smarty) so I started by making a copy of the standard engine phptemplate which basically just includes php files. Then I started modifying until the point where I could create a new View class which then would render all pages. Then I tried if it would work together with one of my themes, and ... it did! I didn't even have to make one change to it but I now I am able to use $html->link() etc. inside of my drupal themes now!

Drupal functions

Well while my setup allows me to use virtually any function of drupal I am writing a library which will ease the use of this with CakePHP. So you will have Models for all kind of drupal related data like the config, nodes, localization, etc.

Search Integration

Another thing that'll be in the package will be a handle for controller not found that will bring up the search function of drupal to the user. But the best thing: I want to have an Ajax autocomplete for it so it'll be really smothe to use ; ).

Now what do you want to see?

As the development is still in a very early stage I'm still trying to figure out what things should belong to the drake project. How do you want permission to be handled? ACL's or Drupal's Right managment? What other stuff are you interested in? Let me know and I'll try to integrate as much as possible of the idea's I like ^^.

--Felix

PS: Sorry about the fact that I've not updated this blog for a while, I didn't have time for devin' and even less for bloging the last couple days. I'll try to get better about it ^^.