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Remote Work, Actually Works!

Written by Amanda on March 23, 2020 •
8027 VIEWS

As a fully remote company, the Cake Development Corporation team is used to working from home. We communicate with our team daily, keep on top of tasks, hold each other accountable and support one another. Heck, a lot of us even do it with kids in the household, too! I consider us extremely lucky to be able to work while juggling an at home life at the same time. It has worked for CakeDC over the past decade, and in my opinion, can work for most companies.

As of last month, an estimated 4.7 million people were working remotely, which grew 44% over the last 5 years. This is just in the United States. Remote work is becoming the norm. Obviously for the next few weeks, this number will be drastically increased, but perhaps this will educate companies on the advantages of a WFH culture. Advantages to employers, besides the operations cost (other than payroll, of course), which can decrease by close to 90%, includes increased productivity. Decreased overhead results in higher salaries, which results in more quality candidates and employees. I understand the concern of the ability to micro-manage (UGH) being unavailable, but according to statistics, 85% of businesses that work remotely confirmed that productivity increased in their companies. When there is more flexibility, there will be higher employee morale.

With the current situation arising from COVID-19, a lot of businesses are forced to transition employees to WFH in order to stay afloat. This not only keeps employees and clients safe, but family members too. I have put together some stats and resources that may help CEO’s and employees transition a little bit easier.

Communication:

It is absolutely essential to keep open communication among a team when everyone is working remotely. Our team uses RocketChat* ( I will include some links in the resource section at the end of this blog), and it has proved to be effective. A chat allows for quicker response time, as well as allowing individuals to set their status (like busy, away, at lunch, sick, etc.). This is a good way to get quick answers, as users can be alerted when they have been messaged or tagged in a company chat. Most of our team work in different timezones, so this is a good way to “stay in the know” about everything happening day to day. We separate chats according to their department. For example: marketing, development, general, etc. We also have the option to private message with co-workers when needed.

Other ideas, if not daily chat interaction, include scheduled meetings. For most of our team meetings, we use Zoom. This tool allows for audio only, as well as video chats.

Accountability & Time Management:

It is important that tasks are managed and followed through. We use programs like Redmine* to track hours and work, in addition to weekly, or monthly conference calls for each department.

If you or your team are new to remote work, it may be in your best interest to assign a project manager, someone who will assign work, track hours, and ensure that work needed is being completed in a timely manner. Without each person being held accountable, the ship will sink, fast. For personal accountability, there are many free apps and tools available. One example is Trello*. This is a scheduling board so that tasks are not forgotten and you can plan your work week and stay organized. Once tasks placed on your “schedule board” are completed, you can make note of it and stay focused on each one according to their priority. You can also keep track of documents and reports. The boards look like this:

Resources:

Documents & Recording -

We <3 Google Docs - we are able to share and edit internally, we couldn’t function without it.

Docusign is a good tool for contracts / documents needing signatures

Invision Freehand - this is a tool where you can create presentations, and allows comments and feedback between designers. Good for freelance designers!

Organization/Tasks -

Trello - for individual time management scheduling.

Redmine - for project assigning, time recording, HR management,

Communication -

RocketChat - allows for multiple internal chats all rolled into one link (allows for individual logins)

Zoom - good for meetings. Allows audio and video chats for teams or reps and clients.

Slack - also a great option for expanded chats. Each person has a “screen name” and can be personally messaged, or public groups can be created (we use this as well). Slack also allows video calls with their paid subscription.

Google Hangouts

WhatsApp - if your team is diverse, like ours, WhatsApp is a must. We are able to text each other, regardless of location - no fees, no service problems (if you have wifi of course).

World Time Buddy - this is a tool that I am not familiar with, but being the designated “scheduler of meetings”, I think I would find it useful. If your team works within different timezones, this allows you to add the location of your teammates, compare times, and find ideal times for meetings.

Community -

In the development world, community support sites are absolutely one of the most important tools. This allows for individuals - inside or outside of your company - to communicate and help each other out. Most developers are aware and utilize these, but if not, may I suggest:

Discourse - chat support

GitHub - our favorite team collaboration tool. GitHub allows for hosting, editing and managing products. We use it for building software and allow for community interaction. It also integrates with a lot of other tools, which is a plus!

Take Away:

These resources are just a drop in the bucket compared to what is available to remote workers. I think this is a reflection of how WFH is becoming more accepted and more normal in the corporate world. I’d love to hear some of your favorites: [email protected].

Let’s take away some positivity to the current quarantined times, and encourage more companies to follow suit. In today’s world, flexibility goes a long way and this type of transition can be mutually beneficial for employers and employees. I mean look at us, we are PRETTY normal… right?

Speaking of being in quarantine - stay healthy, stay inside, and wash your hands!

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CakeFest 2025 Wrap Up

For years I have heard the team talk about Madrid being one of their favorite cities to visit, because they hosted CakeFest there more than a decade ago. I can now confirm… they were right! What a beautiful city. Another great CakeFest in the books… Thanks Madrid! Not only are we coming down from the sugar high, but we are also honored to be celebrating 20 years of CakePHP. It was amazing to celebrate with the attendees (both physical and virtual). If you watched the cake ceremony, you saw just how emotional it made Larry to reminisce on the last 20 years. I do know one thing, CakePHP would not be where it is without the dedicated core, and community. Speaking of the core, we had both Mark Scherer and Mark Story joining us as presenters this year. It is a highlight for our team to interact with them each year. I know a lot of the other members from the core team would have liked to join us as well, but we hope to see them soon. The hard work they put in day after day is unmatched, and often not recognized enough. It’s hard to put into words how grateful we are for this group of bakers. Our event was 2 jam packed days of workshops and talk presentations, which you can now see a replay of on our YouTube channel (youtube.com/cakephp). We had presenters from Canada, Germany, India, Spain, USA, and more! This is one of my favorite parts about the CakePHP community, the diversity and representation from all over the world. When we come together in one room, with one common goal, it’s just magical. Aside from the conference itself, the attendees had a chance to network, mingle, and enjoy meals together as a group. I could sense the excitement of what’s to come for a framework that is very much still alive. Speaking of which… spoiler alert: CakePHP 6 is coming. Check out the roadmap HERE. I feel as though our team leaves the event each year with a smile on their face, and looking forward to the next. The events are growing each year, although we do like to keep the small group/intimate type of atmosphere. I am already getting messages about the location for next year, and I promise we will let you know as soon as we can (when we know!). In the meantime, start preparing your talks, and send us your location votes. The ovens are heating up….

Written by Amanda on October 16, 2025

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Polymorphic Relationships in CakePHP: A Beginner's Guide

Have you ever wondered how to make one database table relate to multiple other tables? Imagine a comments table that needs to store comments for both articles and videos. How do you manage that without creating separate tables or complicated joins? The answer is a polymorphic relationship. It sounds fancy, but the idea is simple and super powerful.

What's a Polymorphic Relationship?

Think of it this way: instead of a single foreign key pointing to one specific table, a polymorphic relationship uses two columns to define the connection. Let's stick with our comments example. To link a comment to either an article or a video, your comments table would have these two special columns:

foreign_id: This holds the ID of the related record (e.g., the id of an article or the id of a video).
model_name: This stores the name of the model the comment belongs to (e.g., 'Articles' or 'Videos').

This flexible setup allows a single comment record to "morph" its relationship, pointing to different types of parent models. It's clean, efficient, and saves you from a lot of redundant code. It's not necessary for them to be called "foreign_id" and "model_name"; they could have other names (table, model, reference_key, model_id, etc.) as long as you maintain the intended function of each. Now, let's see how you can set this up in CakePHP 5 without breaking a sweat.

Making It Work in CakePHP 5

While some frameworks have built-in support for polymorphic relationships, CakePHP lets you create them just as easily using its powerful ORM (Object-Relational Mapper) associations. We'll use the conditions key to define the polymorphic link.

Step 1: Set Up Your Database

We'll use a simple schema with three tables: articles, videos, and comments.

-- articles table
CREATE TABLE articles (
    id INT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
    title VARCHAR(255)
);

-- videos table
CREATE TABLE videos (
    id INT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
    title VARCHAR(255)
);

-- comments table
CREATE TABLE comments (
    id INT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
    content TEXT,
    foreign_id INT NOT NULL,
    model_name VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL
);

Notice how the comments table has our special foreign_id and model_name columns.

Step 2: Configure Your Models in CakePHP

Now for the magic! We'll define the associations in our Table classes. ArticlesTable.php In this file, you'll tell the Articles model that it has many Comments, but with a specific condition.

// src/Model/Table/ArticlesTable.php

namespace App\Model\Table;

use Cake\ORM\Table;

class ArticlesTable extends Table
{
    public function initialize(array $config): void
    {
        // ...
        $this->hasMany('Comments', [
            'foreignKey' => 'foreign_id',
            'conditions' => ['Comments.model_name' => self::class], // or 'Articles'
            'dependent' => true, // Deletes comments if an article is deleted
        ]);
    }
}

Use self::class is a best practice in modern PHP, as it prevents bugs if you ever decide to rename your classes, and your IDE can auto-complete and check it for you VideosTable.php You'll do the same thing for the Videos model, but change the model_name condition.

// src/Model/Table/VideosTable.php

namespace App\Model\Table;

use Cake\ORM\Table;

class VideosTable extends Table
{
    public function initialize(array $config): void
    {
        // ...
        $this->hasMany('Comments', [
            'foreignKey' => 'foreign_id',
            'conditions' => ['Comments.model_name' => self::class], // or 'Videos'
            'dependent' => true,
        ]);
    }
}

CommentsTable.php This table is the owner of the polymorphic association. You can add associations here to easily access the related Article or Video from a Comment entity.

// src/Model/Table/CommentsTable.php

namespace App\Model\Table;

use Cake\ORM\Table;

class CommentsTable extends Table
{
    public function initialize(array $config): void
    {
        // ...
        $this->belongsTo('Articles', [
            'foreignKey' => 'foreign_id',
            'conditions' => ['Comments.model_name' => \App\Model\Table\ArticlesTable::class], // or 'Articles'
        ]);

        $this->belongsTo('Videos', [
            'foreignKey' => 'foreign_id',
            'conditions' => ['Comments.model_name' => \App\Model\Table\VideosTable::class], // or 'Videos'
        ]);
    }
}

Step 3: Using the Relationship

Now that everything is set up, you can fetch data as if it were a normal association. Fetching Comments for an Article:

$article = $this->Articles->get(1, ['contain' => 'Comments']);

// $article->comments will contain a list of comments for that article

Creating a new Comment for a Video:

$video = $this->Videos->get(2);
$comment = $this->Comments->newEmptyEntity();

$comment->content = 'This is an awesome video!';
$comment->foreign_id = $video->id;
$comment->model_name = \App\Model\Table\VideosTable::class; // or 'Videos'

$this->Comments->save($comment);

As you can see, the model_name and foreign_id fields are the secret sauce that makes this pattern work.

What About the Future? The Power of This Solution

Now that you've got comments working for both articles and videos, what if your app grows and you want to add comments to a new model, like Photos? With this polymorphic setup, the change is incredibly simple. You don't need to alter your comments table at all. All you have to do is: Create your photos table in the database. Add a new PhotosTable.php model. In the new PhotosTable's initialize() method, add the hasMany association, just like you did for Articles and Videos.

// src/Model/Table/PhotosTable.php

namespace App\Model\Table;

use Cake\ORM\Table;

class PhotosTable extends Table
{
    public function initialize(array $config): void
    {
        // ...
        $this->hasMany('Comments', [
            'foreignKey' => 'foreign_id',
            'conditions' => ['Comments.model_name' => self::class],
            'dependent' => true,
        ]);
    }
}

That's it! You've just extended your application's functionality with minimal effort. This demonstrates the true power of polymorphic relationships: a single, scalable solution that can easily adapt to your application's evolving needs. It's a key pattern for building flexible and maintainable software.

Conclusion

This approach is flexible, scalable, and a great way to keep your database schema simple. Now that you know the basics, you can start applying this pattern to more complex problems in your own CakePHP applications!

Written by Arodriguez on September 24, 2025

2979 Views

Closing Advent Calendar 2024

This article is part of the CakeDC Advent Calendar 2024 (December 24th 2024) That’s a wrap on the CakeDC 2024 advent calendar blog series. Did you get to read all of them? Hopefully you obtained some useful information to use in your future baking. We would love to get your feedback, feel free to share! It is still hard to believe that 2024 is almost over, but we are looking forward to an extraordinary 2025. On behalf of CakeDC, we want to thank our team for all the hours of hard work they put in this year. Also, thank you to our clients for trusting us with your CakePHP projects, it is an absolute pleasure getting to work with each of you. We are thankful for the great relationships we have built, or carried on in the last 12 months. For our CakePHP community, especially the core team, please know how incredibly grateful we are for your support of the framework. There is a reason that Cake is still around after 20 years, and it’s great developers like you, who dedicate their time and efforts to keep the code going. THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU. As far as what is to come for CakePHP in 2025, stay tuned. However, I am told that there are some top secret (not really, we are opensource after all) talks about CakePHP 6 happening. With the release of PHP 8.4, I am sure some awesome features will be implemented in Cake specifically. We will also be celebrating 20 years of CakePHP next year, can you believe it? CakeFest will be in honor of all core members past and present, and it may be a good time to introduce some new ones as well. If you are a core member (or former), we would love to have you attend the conference this year. The location will be announced soon. Interested in getting involved or joining the core team? You can find some helpful links here: https://cakephp.org/get-involved We hope you enjoyed our gift this year, it’s the least we could do. Wishing you a happy holiday season from our CakeDC family to yours. See you next year! … sorry, I had to do it. :) Also, here are some final words from our President: Larry Masters.

A Christmas Message to the CakePHP Community

As we gather with loved ones to celebrate the joy and hope of the Christmas season, I want to take a moment to reflect on the incredible journey we’ve shared this year as part of the CakePHP community. This is a special time of year when people around the world come together to celebrate love, grace, and the hope that light brings into the world. It’s also a time to give thanks for the connections that make our lives richer. The CakePHP framework has always been about more than just code, it’s about people. It’s the collective effort of contributors from around the world who believe in building something better, together. To everyone who has shared their expertise, contributed code, written documentation, tested features, or offered guidance to others, I want to express my deepest gratitude for your dedication and passion. As we approach 2025, it brings even greater meaning to reflect on how far we’ve come. Next year marks the 20th anniversary of CakePHP. From the first lines of code to the projects we support today, the journey has been nothing short of remarkable. As we look ahead to the new year, let us carry forward this spirit of generosity, collaboration, and unity. Together, we can continue to empower developers, build exceptional tools, and foster a community that is inclusive, welcoming, and supportive. On behalf of everyone at Cake Development Corporation, I wish you and your families a blessed Christmas filled with peace, joy, and love. May the new year bring us more opportunities to create, connect, and grow together. Thank you for being part of this journey. Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year to everyone. With gratitude, Larry Masters This article is part of the CakeDC Advent Calendar 2024 (December 24th 2024)

Written by Amanda on December 24, 2024