Welcome to the Cookbook

Cake's naming conventions can be really nice - you can name your database table big_boxes, your model BigBox, your controller BigBoxesController, and everything just works together automatically. The way CakePHP knows how to tie things together is by inflecting the words between their singular and plural forms.

There are occasions (especially for our non-English speaking friends) where you may run into situations where CakePHP's inflector (the class that pluralizes, singularizes, camelCases, and under_scores) might not work as you'd like. If CakePHP won't recognize your Foci or Fish, you can tell CakePHP about your special cases.

Loading custom inflections

You can use Inflector::rules() in the file app/config/bootstrap.php to load custom inflections.

Inflector::rules('singular', array(
    'rules' => array('/^(bil)er$/i' => '\1', '/^(inflec|contribu)tors$/i' => '\1ta'),
    'uninflected' => array('singulars'),
    'irregular' => array('spins' => 'spinor')
));

1. Inflector::rules('singular', array(
2. 'rules' => array('/^(bil)er$/i' => '\1', '/^(inflec|contribu)tors$/i' => '\1ta'),
3. 'uninflected' => array('singulars'),
4. 'irregular' => array('spins' => 'spinor')
5. ));

Inflector::rules('plural', array('irregular' => array('phylum' => 'phyla')));

1. Inflector::rules('plural', array('irregular' => array('phylum' => 'phyla')));

Will merge the supplied rules into the inflection sets defined in cake/libs/inflector.php, with the added rules taking precedence over the core rules.