This is a Joomla component that allows you to render a CakePHP app inside Joomla. The project was begun in 2007 (supporting Joomla 1.5 and CakePHP 1.2). It currently supports Joomla 3.4.6 and CakePHP 2.9.1, with PHP 5.5+.

A similar plugin for WordPress, CakePress, has also spun out of this project.

Now that Joomla offers on-demand "discovery" of new extensions directly from the file system, it's no longer necessary to package them up if you don't want to. But if you do wish to package this for distribution, follow these steps:

1. Copy the contents of this repo into the a temporary directory somewhere
2. Move administrator/components/com_jake/jake.xml to ./
3. Move administrator/components/com_jake to admin/
4. Move components/com_jake to site/
5. If you're not on Windows, zip it up via commandline. Otherwise, multi-select jake.xml, admin/, and site/. Right-click Send to Compressed (zipped) folder to zip it up and rename the resulting zipfile as desired
6. In the Joomla Extension Manager, browse to the zipfile to install it.

1. In Joomla Administration, under Extensions -> Plug-in Manager, disable the "System - Highlighting" plugin as it conflicts with the Jake component.
2. The CakePHP directory should be named "cakephp" and be a sibling to the Joomla one, i.e., your JOOMLA_ROOT is /path/to/www/joomla-cms and your CAKEPHP_ROOT is /path/to/www/cakephp.
3. Add the following Apache Alias, used for delivering existing files from under CAKEPHP_ROOT/app/webroot, to the Joomla VirtualHost. This should point to the app/webroot directory of the CakePHP app.

Alias /webapp "CAKEPHP_ROOT/app/webroot"
<Directory "CAKEPHP_ROOT/app/webroot">
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

4. Enable URL rewriting on both your JOOMLA_ROOT and CAKEPHP_ROOT
5. Bounce Apache
6. Update the Custom Redirects section of JOOMLA_ROOT/.htaccess as follows to support SEO-friendly CakePHP URLs:

## Begin - Custom redirects
#
# If you need to redirect some pages, or set a canonical non-www to
# www redirect (or vice versa), place that code here. Ensure those
# redirects use the correct RewriteRule syntax and the [R=301,L] flags.
#

# For Jake, we need to handle everything that starts with "app"
# See http://www.phpbb-seo.com/en/apache-mod-rewrite/article3226.html 
# and http://blog.echothis.com/2009/07/22/search-engine-friendly-urls-using-the-jake-bridge/

# First, redirect any static assets to /webapp/* as per http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/setenvif.html
# Note use of (.+) to make sure that /app/ itself is skipped here

SetEnvIfNoCase  REQUEST_URI "\/app\/(.+)$"  path_to_check=cakephp/app/webroot/$1

# Make sure that path_to_check is not empty
RewriteCond     %{ENV:path_to_check} ^(.+)$   

RewriteCond     %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/../%{ENV:path_to_check} -f                     [OR]
RewriteCond     %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/../%{ENV:path_to_check} -d 
RewriteRule     ^app\/(.*)$     /webapp/$1                                      [QSA,L]

# And finally, handle everything remaining as an ordinary Cake action
RewriteRule    ^app(.*)$	/index.php?option=com_jake&jrun=$1		[QSA,L]

## End - Custom redirects

7. Add the following to the top of cakephp/app/Config/routes.php:

if (defined('JAKE')) {
    $httpHost = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
    if (!empty($httpHost)) {
        // FULL_BASE_URL is deprecated, see http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/development/routing.html#Router::fullBaseUrl
        Router::fullBaseUrl((isset($_SERVER['HTTPS']) ? 'https' : 'http') . '://' . $httpHost . '/app');
    }
}

8. Add the following to the bottom of cakephp/app/webroot/index.php:

/**
* Editing below this line should NOT be necessary.
* Change at your own risk.
*
*/ 

App::uses('Dispatcher', 'Routing');
$Dispatcher = new Dispatcher();
$r = new CakeRequest();
if (defined('JAKE'))
{
    
    $r->url = $url;
    $r->here = $url;
    unset($url);
    
    class JakeResponse extends CakeResponse
    {
    /**
     * Sends the response to the client, without some headers - e.g., the Content-Length header shouldn't be set 
     * explicitly because Joomla doesn't set it, and anything Cake would set, would be wrong in this case.
     *
     * @return void
     */
            public function send() {
                    if (isset($this->_headers['Location']) && $this->_status === 200) {
                            $this->statusCode(302);
                    }
                    $codeMessage = $this->_statusCodes[$this->_status];
                    $this->_setCookies();
                    foreach ($this->_headers as $header => $value) {
                            $this->_sendHeader($header, $value);
                    }
                    if ($this->_file) {
                            $this->_sendFile($this->_file);
                            $this->_file = null;
                    } else {
                            $this->_sendContent($this->_body);
                    }
            }
    }
    $Dispatcher->dispatch($r, new JakeResponse(array('charset' => Configure::read('App.encoding'))));
}
else
    $Dispatcher->dispatch($r, new CakeResponse(array('charset' => Configure::read('App.encoding'))));

9. If you have upgraded Joomla from a previous 1.5 version that had the previous Jake component installed (which obviously stopped working when you upgraded), uninstall Jake. In addition, you'll need to manually remove the Jake menu links from the database (which in my experience were not deleted upon uninstall). To do this, execute the following, replacing your Joomla table prefix as appropriate:

DELETE FROM `[TABLE_PREFIX]_menu` WHERE `link` LIKE '%jake%';

For more details on configuration, see this blog post.

After configuration, your CakePHP app is available as-is at http://joomlaserver/app/, so you can do stuff like this:

if (defined('JAKE'))
{
    // do something involving Joomla, e.g., get the JUser object
    $user = JFactory::getUser();
    debug($user);
}

To add Joomla menu items linked to URL's in your Cake app, in the Joomla Menu Manager, add a new Menu Item of type "External URL" and enter the link path, e.g., /app/posts/add.

This project was originally developed in 2007 by Mariano Iglesias and Max. Further credits go to Dr. Tarique Sani for his insightful ideas. It is now maintained by Rolf Kaiser.