I needed a way of uploading multiple images in the admin area of the Chameleon Photography site. During my Cake 1.3 days, I would have used WebTechNick‘s CakePHP File Upload Plugin for this purpose, but now that I’m developing with Cake 2.0, this doesn’t work any more.

I had spend a few hours trying to figure out the best way of doing this myself, but came up short, so I took a look at a post on Jose’s blog that I had bookmarked in the past: CakePHP Plugins – A Biblical Retelling. This is a list of very useful plugins covering common Cake tasks such as searching, pagination, optimisation, debugging, and most importantly, file uploading.

Long story short, this lead me to his Upload behaviour, which I installed, and found that it worked without any drama. This alone would have been good enough…

But wait, there’s more…

I’m a recent convert to Git, and while I know enough of how it works to do the majority of what I need, there is a lot I don’t know about it, such as how to get Git to clone/pull from a named branch, or how to set-up a submodule (which, I’m lead to believe, is the optimal way of using plugins in Cake).

Not a problem, not only had Jose provided full instructions on THREE different ways to install the plugin (one manually, two via Git), these instructions were customised for each separate branch, meaning all I had to do was copy/paste his code into my command line, and I was done.

In fact, all the instructions provided, covering everything from instillation and usage to customisation options, were complete, well written, and specific for the version Cake they were intended to be used with, as a lot had changed between Cake 1.3 and 2.0. (Oh, and the plugin itself is quite good too, with image resizing and validation built in).

Anyway, thank you very much Jose. Your level of commitment to your open source code is commendable. I can only hope that when I start to give back to the web, I do half as good a job as you have.