Categories Plugin for CakePHP

for cake 2.x

The categories plugin is for allowing users to organize any data into categories.

It provides a basic admin interface to manage both tree and flat style categories.

Any item of data can be added to one or more categories. For this, you can use a hasMany or hasAndBelongsToMany (HABTM) association. The database structure provides a join table called categorized for implementation of HABTM associations in case the items belong to several categories.

Installation

Place the problems folder into any of your plugin directories for your app (for example app/plugins or cake/plugins)
Create database tables using either the schema shell or the CakeDC Migrations plugin: cake schema create --plugin Categories --name categories or cake migration run all --plugin Categories
As this plugin depends on the CakeDC Utils plugin, you need to get it too and follow it's installation instructions (for this plugin dropping it into the plugins folder will be enough)
For the categories administrative section you will need to activate the admin routing prefix in your core.php file located in the config folder of your app. Configure::write('Routing.prefixes', array('admin'));
Optionally, if the model class representing your users in your application is not called User, you can specify what class should be used by adding this configuration option to any loaded configuration file as bootstrap.php: Configure::write('App.UserClass', 'MyAppUser');

Usage

Using the categories plugins is as simple as adding a new association to your the models you want to categorize. The following example will categorize the articles having a category_id field on the table:

class Articles extends AppModel {
	public $belongsTo = array(
		'Category' => array(
			'className' => 'Categories.Category',
			'foreignKey' => 'category_id'
		)
	);
}

If your application demands multiple categories for each item, you would need to do the binding as follows:

class Articles extends AppModel {
	public $hasAndBelongsToMany = array(
		'Category' => array(
			'className' => 'Categories.Category',
			'foreignKey' => 'foreign_key',
			'associationForeignKey' => 'category_id',
			'with' => 'Categories.Categorized'
		)
	);
}

For this second case you need to provide a model name for each time you categorize an item. This is a possible method to categorize articles and save the association correctly:

class Articles extends AppModel {
	...

	public function categorize($articleId, $categoryId) {
		$this->Categorized->save(array(
			'category_id' => $categoryId,
			'foreign_key' => $articleId,
			'model' => $this->alias
		));
	}
}

Internationalized categories introduced

Implemented I18nCategory model that togather with tranlation behavior and i18n plugin allow to implement

multilanguage categories support.

For set of tranlated languages in admin interface used language settings from i18n plugin:

constant DEFAULT_LANGUAGE and configure storage parameter 'Config.languages'.

The administrative section

This plugin provides a very simple administrative section where you can list, create, edit and delete categories for your application. To access this section make sure you have the "admin" routing prefix enable as described in the installation instructions, also this plugin makes use of the Auth Component, to restrict access to this actions.

To access this section just point your browser to example.com/admin/categories/categories changing your host or app install folder accordingly. This page will show you a flat list of created categories.

Going to example.com/admin/categories/categories/tree will show you the same list of categories but in a tree structure.

Requirements

PHP version: PHP 5.2+
CakePHP version: Cakephp 1.3 Stable
CakeDC Utils plugin

Support

For support and feature request, please visit the Categories Plugin Support Site.

For more information about our Professional CakePHP Services please visit the Cake Development Corporation website.

Branch strategy

The master branch holds the STABLE latest version of the plugin. Develop branch is UNSTABLE and used to test new features before releasing them.

Previous maintenance versions are named after the CakePHP compatible version, for example, branch 1.3 is the maintenance version compatible with CakePHP 1.3. All versions are updated with security patches.

Contributing to this Plugin

Please feel free to contribute to the plugin with new issues, requests, unit tests and code fixes or new features. If you want to contribute some code, create a feature branch from develop, and send us your pull request. Unit tests for new features and issues detected are mandatory to keep quality high.

License

Licensed under The MIT License
Redistributions of files must retain the above copyright notice.

Copyright

Copyright 2009-2010
Cake Development Corporation
1785 E. Sahara Avenue, Suite 490-423
Las Vegas, Nevada 89104
http://cakedc.com

gBokiau / categories