Planet CakePHP

If you want to create websites fast, and I mean really fast you sooner or later will look into using a framework. Frameworks are a great way to save time and nerves because they have a lot of often used functionality (e.g. user login etc.) already built in and also help you by providing a certain structure for your coding.
There are a lot of web development frameworks out there. One of the best known is probably Ruby on Rails. What I’ve seen this framework is really great, so if you happen to have no programming experience at all and want to learn a new programming language from scratch RoR is definitely going to be a good choice. I, for my part, have been coding PHP since 5 years or so and didn’t feel like learning a new language. But that’s not a big problem because there are several frameworks available for PHP as well. But which one to choose? I first had a look at the ZEND framework which is very popular. But I wasn’t really satisfied with it and kept looking. I finally found cakePHP and have never thought about switching to something else since then…

cakePHP is sometimes refered to as a PHP clone of RoR. I cannot comment on this really, because I have never used RoR myself but some features (e.g. Scaffolding) seem to be very similiar indeed. What is so great about the cakePHP framework is that you basically build your website based entirely on the framework. With ZEND you have far more freedom (e.g. with the database model) and that’s why it doesn’t support the development process as much. Another great thing about cakePHP is the community - although documentation is sometimes out of date, there are great tutorials and discussion groups to help you learning cakePHP and with problems that might occur.