Reformatting the default CakePHP layout (default.ctp)

So after working on my authentication and application security I thought it’s time to mess with the looks of my site.  To start off, I wanted to obviously change the title of my site and do some minor changes on the main layout.

When you want to change something a programmers first instinct is to look for the text you want to change by maybe doing a grep or a file-search.   And I did, however, the title appeared in a file called default.ctp that was outside my app folder.  And we wouldn’t want to mess with anything outside the app folder specially if it’s inside the cake folder.

After a few more reading, it turns out we need to create our own default.ctp inside our app folder e.g. app/views/layouts/default.ctp.  So what I did was to copy the default.ctp from the cake/libs/views/layout and customized it to my preference.  I realized, the application title, is kinda redundant (as how it was implemented) and I was hoping there’d be some configuration item that I could simply change to globally specify my application title but no.  I’d probably have to do that myself as part of the configuration class.

I’m currently looking for a summary of all the available variables I could put in the default.ctp (of course with some description and explanation as to how to effectively use them)  like I see there’s $title_for_layout, $scripts_for_layout, $content_for_layout,  $cakeDebug.  If I don’t find one, then I’d probably write one if I later find to be important.