Planet CakePHP

Hey folks,

if you are on twitter, you probably heard that cakefest #3 was beyond awesome again this time around.

Amongst other things, Nate spoke about the announcement of Cake3 which is a largely rewritten version of CakePHP that works exclusively with PHP5.3+ and takes advantage of all the new features like namespaces and closures. You can already check the source, but hold your breath - this version is many many months away from a release.

On the first day, Gwoo talked about the more immediate future of CakePHP. CakePHP 2.0 will pretty much be CakePHP 1.2 (ok, actually 1.3) with PHP5 strict-mode compliance. There should be no breaks in backwards computability, but we expect to see a significant performance boost from dropping PHP4 support.

There was a lot of discussion up front on whether Cake3 should be based on the current core or whether it should be a rewrite like it is now. We hope that the benefits of a new architecture will outweigh the problems of backwards compatibility in the long run. It will certainly be interesting to see the uptake of 5.3 as it is a much more significant revision than the version number would indicate.

Anyway, back to the past. The conference was preceded by a 2-day workshop. There was some trouble getting started since we intended to hand out a copy of the app we were going to build that had just the design with it, but falling back to an empty core worked as well. Over the 2 days Nate & Mariano did a fantastic job building a twitter-clone from scratch that also interacts with the actual twitter via a datasource and demonstrates many other CakePHP tools. I think we hit an even better compromise of not overloading beginners and making it still attractive to intermediates, but there also seemed to be some demand for an advanced-CakePHP only workshop.

The conference itself was quite fantastic as well. We had ~70 people at the event, which was a bit of a challenge when trying to pick bars & restaurants at night : ). Pretty much all presentations were fantastic and seemed to be a good mix of different topics.

Garrett also introduced us to a new gentleman game that he has helped to develop named: Fork Master. The game is beyond fantastic and there is an internationally rapidly growing community of players now : ).

-- Felix Geisendörfer aka the_undefined

PS: Graham is uploading all CakeFest slides right now as well as writing articles covering the talks in detail.

Update 1: Just saw that Kevin also has a fantastic post on the things he picked up at cakefest.