So recently at my job we started a new project. We decided to go with an MVC framework on this project and the only one I knew of off the top of my head was CakePHP. Long story short thats the one we decided to go with. I must say I am quite impressed. I never thought writing a web application this complicated could be this easy. I never understood database relationships until I forced myself to learn how cake does it, of course I could probably never do it properly outside of cake, but I understand the concept now. We still have a long way to go on this project and I have alot left to learn about cake. One of the problems I have noticed is the lack of reference and tutorials. There seems to be a general lack of people using cake and so those are few and far between, but the ones that exist are always very good. I’ve thrown some reference links at the bottom for anyone who wants to dig into cake.
API: http://api.cakephp.org - Full developer documentation of the framework. Anything and everything you could ever want to know in very confusing(yet still usable) format =)
Wiki: http://wiki.cakephp.org - This is the CakePHP Wiki where people post tutorials and howto’s and it also has a copy of the Cake manual on there.
CakeBin: http://cakephp.org/pastes - another pastebin clone, this time written in cake and hosted on the cake servers for all your cake pasting needs
CakeForge: http://cakeforge.org - A Source Forge like application written on the CakePHP framework used to host projects of cake developers/users. Some very useful code up there.
http://h3rald.com - Personal website of a Cake ‘Baker’ with blog, links, and articles.
cake baker: http://cakebaker.wordpress.com/ - Another Cake related blog written by a software engineer from Switzerland. Lots of good content.
irc://irc.freenode.net/cakephp - the official CakePHP IRC Channel on Freenode. An unlimited amount of knowledge resides in this channel.
http://grahambird.co.uk/cake/ - A beginner oriented cake blog with tutorials and walkthrough’s and general explinations.
ThinkingPHP: http://thinkingphp.org/ - Blog of a hardcore cake hacker working on a framework on top of the Cake framework to give added more customized functionality. You can check it out here.
Excellent choice: it’s nice to see that people are starting to use Cake for big projects, and I hope you’ll tell us more about your project and how Cake helped you.
I agree, there are not too many websites using CakePHP, or at least they aren’t listed in the CakePHP’s showcase in the wiki (it seems down now, they are updating all the Cake sites). Now that CakePHP reached the 1.0 milestone maybe more PHP programmers will start using it, so I’m sure we’ll soon see some more Cake-powered sites: some people feel “intimidated” by a framework if it’s still in beta/RC stage, but now they don’t have excuses :P
I will tell you more about the project as I am allowed to, the owners are wanting to keep it on the hush hush for now. So far though I really love cake, and I learn new shit I can do with it on a daily basis. Just today I learned how to use the builtin validator feature and also extend it with the two available options on the wiki. Being able to validate form data against a function automagically is such a time saver, I absolutely love it.