I follow one convention for view helper method names and it basically says that it should make sense in the rendering context, wich usually means that verbs are not good choices as the “phrase” is always suffixed with echo or print.

oh yeah, I use FF…

no it doesn’t mean it!
it means that i got you on my google reader, with many stars, on my delicious, in a special cakephp/programming bundle, and that I often “crawl” around your codes, tips and comments, cuz it’s usually good stuff.

I have to admit I never saw it in this way: “echo this element: login_form”. But I think it contains a translation error: “$this” doesn’t refer to the element but the view object ;-) Anyway, you could also say “echo element login_form”.

On the other hand you can read the code in the order it is processed: “element login_form and echo it” vs. “render element login_form and echo it”.

Or you could argument that an element is a kind of view and the method name should be simply “render”.

So, in the end it is probably a philosophical question which name is better.

I’m sorry the form was emptied. I’m not sure what the cause is of that, as the form is only cleared with Firefox but not with Konqueror. It’s something I have to investigate…

Oh, and you are the first who calls me one of his gurus, I hope that doesn’t mean you don’t question what I write ;-)

first elements are intended to be part of the view context, so you are already rendering…
and on the semantic path we got the following:
echo $this->element(‘login_form’);
wich one could translate:
echo this element : login_form

much better than the deprecated:
echo $this->renderElement(‘login_form’);
echo this render element: login_form… wow its so prolix…

and it’s shorter, wich is one of the most wanted view features: short lines…

btw, you are one of my gurus! lol
ps: when I first wrote, i mispelled my email and got a flash complaining the error, but no redirects, and when I came back, the form whas emptied… :( … hate rewriting…

cheers!

The naming of methods is not really consistent in cake, many methods follow the verb convention, others, like most methods of the FormHelper, ignore it. I think that’s the result of not having an explicit naming convention for method names (there is only the convention of having camel-cased method names).

However, I guess as Mark points out, cakePHP doesn’t really follow the verb convention often anyhow. This may very well make cakePHP more consistent with itself, but not quite what I would’ve had in mind ;)

@Juan: Thanks for the hint, it is now fixed in the article.

@Steve: Yes, you remember correctly, View::element was originally a wrapper method for View::renderElement.

@Mark: Personally I prefer method names to start with a verb because methods do something.