Been struggling with something lately – and that is to get the select boxes on the edit / add views of a cakePHP app to show the correct thing.

For instance I have a Countries table that has an association to the UserAddress model, to get this association and pull out the country name rather than the coutnry_id I have to do the following:

$countries = $this->UserAddress->Country->find('list', array('fields' => array('Country.country')));

Sometimes CakePHP automagic takes away a bit of common sense from us

I’ve been experimenting with CSS sprites as of late, Simply speaking a CSS Sprite is a bunch of images amalgamated into a single image that you then use CSS and the :hover etc functions associated to links to move different parts of that image into view (Tabs would be an ideal example of this – or anything you want to change on hover).

Anyway I found this very cool site that explains a lot more about it and it provides a cool tool to help you merge your own CSS sprites.

http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/