And, here, to cap off a really terrible brain day, is the solution, using cake’s core functionality, to the find(‘neighours’) with habtm conundrum!

$this->Mixture->bindModel(array('hasOne'=>array('MixtureCategoriesMixture')), false);
$this->set('neighbours', $this->Mixture->find('neighbors', array(
	'field' => 'Mixture.sku', 'value' => $this->data['Mixture']['sku'],
	'conditions'=>array(
		'MixtureCategoriesMixture.default'=>1,
		'MixtureCategoriesMixture.mixture_category_id'=>$this->data['MixtureCategory'][0]['id'],
		'Mixture.status'=>1
	)
)));

Doh, doh doh!

After some IRCing, it appears I’d misunderstood how the array should work to get the method working correctly.

$this->set('neighbours', $this->Species->find('neighbors', array(
	'field' => 'Species.latin_name', 'value' => $this->data['Species']['latin_name'], 'order'=>'asc',
	'conditions'=>array(
		'Species.species_category_id'=>$this->data['Species']['species_category_id'],
		'Species.status'=>1
	)
)));

What a plonker.

Found brain, solution realised, brainfart over, see http://blog.jben.net/post/125858269/update-on-find-neighbours-with-habtm

Brain found, solution realised, brain fart over, see http://blog.jben.net/post/125844770/update-on-find-neighbours

A question came up on #cakephp about mystery open_base_dir errors, so I thought I’d document my fix. As I don’t use any other libraries when working with Cake projects, I simply removed the existing include path in /app/webroot/index.php.

on line 69 change:

ini_set('include_path', CAKE_CORE_INCLUDE_PATH . PATH_SEPARATOR . ROOT . DS . APP_DIR . DS . PATH_SEPARATOR . ini_get('include_path'));

to

ini_set('include_path', CAKE_CORE_INCLUDE_PATH . PATH_SEPARATOR . ROOT . DS . APP_DIR . DS);

Hope this helps someone.