this post is a good hands-on for setting up a facebook app in CakePHP.

If you have never used CakePHP i suggest you go through the 15 minute blog tutorial

After you do the the tutorial the facebook tutorial will make a lot of sense.

build facebook app with cakePHP

Somebody wrote an excellent post on how to make CakePHP work on LigHTTPD. It didn't work for me right away because for some reason mod_rewrite or my CakePHP settings are different from the "default" behavior.

Most blogs say that their URL arguments for non-tidy URLs are like this: /cakedir/index.php?url=pagename. However, for some reason my URLs are like this: /cakedir/index.php/pagename. I'm not sure why that is.

Nevertheless, you can follow the instructions in the blog post but if you have the same URL path rewrite setup as I do you will need to make a critical change to the url.rewrite-once statement:

#this is the original
   url.rewrite-once = (
    "^/(css|files|img|js|stats)/(.*)$" => "/$1/$2",
    "^/(.*)$" => "/index.php?url=$1"
   )

#change the index.php part
   url.rewrite-once = (
    "^/(css|files|img|js|stats)/(.*)$" => "/$1/$2",
    "^/(.*)$" => "/index.php/$1"
   )

Enabling CakePHP 1.1 on Lighttpd 1.5

I was having trouble getting PHP 5 fastcgi to work with lighttpd on my Mac OS X 10.4 laptop. The core of the problem is that the default port install of php5 on the mac does not include CGI support.

The command you are looking for is

sudo port install php5 +fastcgi

#use this command to see what options are available
port variants php5

I believe this is the Mac equivalent to ubuntu's command

sudo apt-get install php5-cgi

PHP 5 and LightTPD on Mac OS X

I've been having a lot of trouble figuring out how to configure general mac startup services. I've also had tons of trouble figuring out how to configure lighttpd.conf files. I came across this TextSnippets website that seems to have a lot of good examples for configuring all this crazy server and OS X related stuff.

Lighttpd launchd item for OS X 10.4

I just got used to using Ubuntu Linux over the past couple years and now we use Macs at work. The trouble is that the Mac flavor of UNIX is quite a bit different from the way Ubuntu works. I found this to be a helpful introduction to understanding the similarities and differences between Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux.

Top Ten Mac OS X Tips for Unix Geeks