CakePHP - search forms and paginating results the easy way, with a new component and helper to boot

I've made many search forms that query thousands of records and can return as many results, thus requiring pagination. For the first three search forms i've created, it ended up being a re-education every time with many conditionals and general monkeying-around with a side of tom-foolery: passing the search form variables to the pagination helper, checking to see if search parameters have passed, if not then set defaults, etc, etc...

So after the third search form I decided to spend a little extra time to make the process more streamlined, and hope you can find it useful as well.

Welcome!

My name is Brandon Plasters and I'm an avid web application developer. To help promote my business I've decided to blog what I've learned along the way, to contribute back to the coding community- of which I can thank for 90% of my coding knowledge thus far.

I'd like to thank Miha Nahtigal for the lilblogs CakePHP plugin I used for this blog.

I also figured it's time to use alpha-channel .png images on my blog design. For the purpose of this blog I don't need backwards compatability for IE6, the reasoning being that if you're visiting a code developer's blog with an out-of-date browser then you've got a thing or two to learn about the web before even thinking about visiting a developer's site. It's all about target audience.

so please enjoy and comment often! :)