Introduction

On his blog, Graham Bird, a British web designer, presents a great list of questions any potential CakePHP user should ask themselves:

"Cake is for you if:

  • you like the cleverness and automation of Ruby on Rails
  • you already know PHP and don't have time to learn another language
  • you are tired of creating bespoke code to do very similar things
  • you use shared hosting
  • you want to get more done in less time
  • you want to use templating
  • you want nice, searchable URLs - not things like post.php?id=12345678
  • you don't want to run things from the command-line
  • you only have one MySQL database (table prefixing is an option)"

“Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.” So goes the mission of CakePHP. This essay will explore the history of the framework, some of the basic theory and functionality behind CakePHP, an example of CakePHP in the wild, and the vast and active community supporting the framework. Read more.