CakePHP beginner's question about views

Question

Hello,

I have finally quit the idea of learning Zend and instead i find CakePHP and CodeIgniter to be very impressive and simple to understand rather than cramming the strange global functions and configuration of index.php. Anyways, i wanted to ask you that CakePHP even spits out Html in sort of php language like :-

<?= $html->css('default'); ?>

Do i have to necessarily use this syntax only? or can i use plain old HTML's link tag to load my stylesheet? If i have to strictly follow these rules only, then how shall i use JQuery and such things in CakePHP?

Thanks in advance :)

Answer 1

You can use plain html in .ctp files. However using the helpers provided by CakePHP will make your life a lot easier.

As for using JavaScript (like jquery)

echo $javascript->link('scriptfile'); 

Take a look at the cake book for more info:

http://book.cakephp.org/view/206/Inserting-Well-Formatted-elements

http://book.cakephp.org/view/349/Methods

Answer 2

In your view files, you can use anything that would be valid in a PHP file.

• In your mind, just think HTML and PHP at the same time:
• PHP inside <?php ... ?> (don't ever do this: <? ... ?> - IE will fail)
• JS inside <script type=....> ... </script>
• HTML inside: ...well, not inside anything.
• You can include inline CSS or CSS files with HTML or via helper.
• Even PHP includes can be used.

Using the css and javascript and html image helpers, if the path you specify does not include a '/' at the first char, CakePHP will look in webroot/css (or webroot/js or webroot/img). If the first char of the path is a '/' then you can specify your own location, e.g.

• echo $javascript->link('scriptfile'); // webroot/js/scriptfile.css (note the helper appends the filetype)

• echo $javascript->link('/myScripts/scriptfile'); // webroot/myScripts/scriptfile.css