How i became a baker

Whenever I realize I am overwhelmed by work I go and find something that makes me more productive. Until I am overwhelmed again, and the circle repeats. Wanting to improve my coding time I started looking for help in a framework. My first take was Code Igniter. I used it as the base for four projects and everything went smooth. But Code Igniter doesn’t give all the abstraction and automatism I want. Rails looks like it does, but I want to stay close the the familiar C++ syntax I am used to. The best from both worlds is Cake PHP. Now finishing my second project powered by Cake, I can say that Cake is my love.

There are tens of comparisons of these two frameworks out there in the wild. I will just enumerate some reasons I think Cake is really great, and why I decided to use it.

1. Debug messages. Cake shows you all the queries performed and all the controller dump—everything. You can find out in an instant if something screws up the system. In all the reviews I read, there is no mention of this and I don’t know why.
2. Cake forces you to have healthy code practices. Basically all the conventions Cake has take a little time to adjust but when you get the hang of it, it just flies. Code Igniter lets you get creative with your structure, but after a year when you go back to a project you will always frown. If others say that Cake has a steeper learning curve, don’t be scared, you will really appreciate it afterwards.
3. It gives you a push start to glory. I’ve finished a full web page CMS in 5 hours(I had the xhtml and css done) just by baking the project. It has admin routing, user authentication and rights, file uploading, thumbnail making, wysiwym—all in 5 hours.
4. Excellent caching

The documentation is really scarce. The API and the manual are somehow hard to navigate through. If you can endure this, in the end the benefices are really great. Give Cake a try.