One thing I miss about Ruby on Rails is the model validation. Right out of the box CakePHP does not have great validation. I’ve been specifically looking for a good implementation of validating the uniqueness of an attribute.

After doing some research, Evan of evansagge.com has written a fantastic solution to CakePHP’s lack of model validation. I’ve implemented it and it works very nicely. Here are some of the builtin validation options:

• validateNotEmpty
• validatePattern (you can pass through any regex pattern you would like)
• validateWord - for validating that there’s only regular characters
• validateInteger
• validateNumber
• validateFloat
• validateDouble
• validateEmail
• validateUnique
• validateLength - specify a min and max
• and more…

His Validation also gives very nice methods of accessing the error messages in your templates.