learning cakephp

[Administrator]

I would appreciate your help if you can provide me with some online tutorial links or name of some books to learn cakephp.

one of my close friend has got a yearly contract from a company which needs cakephp developer and I need to help him.

[jon123]

I think Kev is a cakephp man!

[kev woodman]

I am the King of CakePHP

It's a nice little framework and we now have three separate projects in work that use it. Personally I've had enough of PHP and would like to move some of our stuff onto a different platform but Cake has revitalised it a bit.

Documentation is pretty good for an open source project but it's still a bit light in places. Tell your friend that Google is his/her best bet for particular problems but if you're just getting started then the 15 minute blog tutorial is a good intro.

Graham Bird's tutorials at "grahambird.co.uk/cake/tutorials/"

are good and there's one on creating a nice Ajax to-do list at " grahambird.co.uk/cake/tutorials/ajax.php" with little fade effects on it.

IBM have run a tutorial series on building a Wiki with Cake at "www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/os-dw-os-php-cake1.html" and cakebits has a list of 27 tutorials at " cakebits.net/2007/03/27/27-useful-cakephp-tutorials/ "
To be honest you find that a lot of these tutorials are very similar, and the great advantage of Cake is that once you've got a basic idea of how it works you can just jump right in and start coding your killer app, and then when you run into problems the Google Group and the IRC channel are great at providing answers.

[jon123]

I wouldn't mind getting to time to learn it. Unfortunately my memory can only retain a small fraction of what it used to be able to handle. I am having to relearn php stuff already learnt before. That along with Adobe software, 3Dmax, etc. But I will sit down and give it a try soon, especially sinse I already have uploaded it to the server

[kev woodman]

It doesn't take that much to learn mate - in fact you can get along perfectly well in Cake without knowing massive amounts of PHP. I was only a casual PHP user before I had to develop in Cake but general programming skills come in more useful than familiarity with the language.

I know what you mean about squeezing the information in. I had to learn 3DS Max a couple of years ago and it was initially a hard slog. I'm supposed to be getting up to speed on Flex now and Flash remoting but I know I'm going to have to forget something in order to make room - possibly my name and where I live

[jon123]

yes i understand what you mean! well I would If i could remember what you we were discussing

I used to be fairly fluent with php but not these days. I get by with refering back to previous work, but dare say that these days i am more of a cut and paste guy, probably the source of my problem.

I am also struggling big time with 3Dmax, so much so that it has been a few weeks since i even opened it up! I will try and give cakephp a go over the weekend. Let you know how i get on.

[Administrator]

now he says that the project is to be done in something called Symphony. Not sure what it is but this time he has to find information on Symphony.

[kev woodman]

Another PHP framework - we trialled Symphony but went for Cake in the end. There are a few RAD frameworks knocking about now but I'm not sure we shouldn't have skipped PHP altogether and used Ruby.

[Administrator]

are you 100% sure that cakephp is better than Symphony ?

I may suggest the project owner if you can give me some reasons to convince them for CakePHP. I don't have knowledge of php or html but I would like to have better future for my friend so if cakephp is better then I need to convince his bosses.

[kev woodman]

'Better' is one of those words best avoided when it comes to platforms/frameworks/stacks or anything else related to software development.

At the time we felt that although Symphony promised some attractive features the Cake community was more active and the documentation was a lot more thorough. This may not look that important at the start of a project but further down the line it's a lot more valuable than a lot of pre-built functionality.

Also we felt that Cake was more likely to be in ongoing development than most of the other frameworks. We spoke informally to a couple of the developers in charge and were impressed by their plans for the future. In fact the two projects that I'm not involved with in work that are Cake based are both using version 1.2 which adds a lot of functionality and is very stable. The only problem is that documentation is a but sparse for it.

Of course all this may have changed by now and Symphony might have a superb documentation set...or it may just have those couple of killer features that you really need. In the end it's a subjective choice based on all sorts of things.