Beyond the Scaffold

Understanding basic installation routines, understanding naming conventions, and using table associations for good database organization will improve your development time and help you get off the ground with your project much more quickly. However, every application will need to move beyond the scaffold before it is ready for deployment. Indeed, the scaffolding feature is really intended for what I covered in this chapter: testing table associations without needing to code any HTML and providing a basic structure to tinker with a few application ideas before getting too deep in programming the site.

Chapter 5 will introduce to you the Bake script, a handy console program that runs much like the scaffold but supplies you with editable code from which you can expand your application. You'll improve the blog and adjust the views to bring it more in line with a production-level Cake application. As always, I recommend you practice using the table associations a few times with other scenarios, bringing in the parameters for each association, and customizing the association to get a feel for the models and good database design. The quicker you can take an application from zero to running the scaffold with advanced table associations, the more comfortable you'll feel with the MVC structure and the fundamental process Cake applications follow.