As we said before on our small and unofficial review of the best known and most used PHP MVC Frameworks CakePHP is only on third place. Is a great framework and the number of those who use it confirm this. With a bit more difficult learning curve than CodeIngniter or Symfony but not like Zend Framework, CakePHP gives you a great list of options on how to build your project. As the other two mentioned in the previous articles and as the one that will be under our magnifying glass in the last article, CakePHP has support for internationalisation, databases migration, form validation, templates and all basic things that are needed in a project but if you don’t have them you have to spend a lot of time to build them and time means money. These are only a few things that came in our mind but there is a full list of features for all of them and CakePHP is not an exception. The problem with CakePHP is the footprint, speed and maybe, as we saw in our small test, the learning curve or the time until you feel comfortable with the framework. Around this framework there is a great community and you can find quite a lot of help out there but the help will give you only a small ray of light and you need low-level understanding, you need to understand the logic and the approach behind everything if you want to use it in your project and here is where CakePHP has a problem in our opinion.
We are pretty sure that there are a lot of pros and cons and we’ll highly appreciate if you could let us know some of them but we come back again to the same conclusion from the previous articles, it’s up to you entirely and all depends on what do you like and/or need for you project. In the next article we will say our opinion about Zend Framework and some other final details. We’d tried not to be technical along these three parts and hopefully some of you, that are not at this point so technical, will use this as a starting point because this is why we have written these articles about the most used PHP MVC Frameworks.
more soon …