Tony Thomas

Father to two, husband to one, web developer and musician.


Archive for February, 2010


CakePHP: Containable Behavior is Your Friend

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

When it comes to optimizing your CakePHP queries, you need to abandon Recursive and adopt Containable.

In the example below I have the following models:

  • Patient
  • Specimen
  • Result
  • ResultType

The associations in the model are:

  • Result
    • belongsTo
      • ResultType
        • hasMany
          • Result
      • Patient
        • hasMany
          • Result
          • Specimen
      • Specimen
        • belongsTo
          • Patient
        • hasMany
          • Result

(more…)

Baseline Theme Version 1.0.1

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

There is a new version of the Baseline Theme. In the last few days of tinkering with it and modifying it for use with this website, I noticed a small bug. The Blueprint IE reset was acting funny in conjunction with the IE8 JavaScript. I chose to make IE8.js the default with the option of including Blueprint’s reset instead. (more…)

Blueprint Optional Fancy-Type Plugin

Monday, February 15th, 2010

The Baseline Development WordPress Theme has Blueprint plugged in already. There are some optional Blueprint plugins you can take advantage of. We’ll take a look at the fancy-type plug-in. (more…)

Why Use Blueprint and the 960 Grid System in the Baseline Theme?

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

An Inventory of Blueprint’s Style Resets and Useful Classes

A friend contacted me about using the Baseline WordPress theme, but asked why I included both Blueprint and the 960 Grid System. The short answer is that Blueprint has a number of browser resets that I like to take advantage of and 960 GS offers greater flexibility in terms of the width of columns and their gutter widths. Especially if you want to adhere to the Golden Ratio for design. 960 pixels divides very neatly into 3.

Let’s take a look at what Blueprint does to reset some things to establish a cross-browser baseline. (more…)

Introducing the Baseline Development WordPress Theme

Monday, February 8th, 2010

I’ve come up with some habits that I’ve developed from building themes for WordPress over the years. One, is to start with a nearly blank style sheet. I also like to hook in several JavaScript libraries and CSS frameworks from the start to take advantage of things like JQuery, Blueprint’s CSS reset and Superfish menus. (more…)