PHP Frameworks - CakePHP

In my quest to see if Frameworks are worth using I decided that there is no better way to know this than to actually use one in a project. I'm working on a new site for a Church and decided to use PHPCake for the Framework. For those of you who have never heard of it, it's an MVC framework, much like Ruby on Rails, but it uses PHP instead of Ruby.

Setup -

Installation was pretty simple, I downloaded it, uncompressed it to my webroot (on my dev server). Then pointed a browser at it and a page actually came up, not bad considering I have not done any configuration changes yet. This default page tells me that my database configuration file is not set. I went in to my MySQL server and created a DB for it. Then found the database config file in /app/config/ called database.php.default. The important detail here is to rename it to just database.php dropping the .default from the file name. And don't forget to enter your database info in this file as well. The next step is to change the look and feel of the default page, it even tells you a bit on how to do this. So far so good, I'm liking it! I will post again when I get into the views and controlers.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 18th, 2006 at 9:02 pm and is filed under PHP, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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2 Responses to “PHP Frameworks - CakePHP”

  1. Arie Says:
    October 29th, 2006 at 6:23 am

    So, what is is your conclusion is cakePHP worthwhile? I haven’t seen a follow-up article.

  2. mnoga Says:
    October 30th, 2006 at 9:26 am

    Hey Arie,

    Sorry for the lack of follow up, the project for the Church has been on hold for a long time so I have not had the chance to complete a whole project with PHPCake yet. But I have used it for a few small internal apps for testing and such. Here are my conclusions so far;

    1. The framework as a whole is quite impressive, and very mature regardless of the version number.

    2. Comes with lots of built in capability which comes in very handy like AJAX, Validation and Cacheing.

    3. The documentation needs work, if your willing to learn by trial and error then it’s not so bad. However there is a neat little Cheat Sheet available at the PHPCake web site (http://cakephp.org/downloads)

    4. It is very OOP centric, so if your not used to OOP in PHP then you may have a harder time getting things started.

    I hope this was able to help you out a bit, if you decide to use it, come back and post your thoughts and a link to the site, I would love to see what others are doing with it.

    Thanks and good luck!
    Michael

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