I’ve been trying out CakePHP, a framework for creating DB driven PHP based websites using the MVC design pattern.

Warning: In case the above sentence didn’t make this clear, this post is largely technical gibberish. If that’s not your thing, then you can move along and look at the pretty pictures from a hiking trip up Mt. Monadnock from back in September.

My feelings with CakePHP so far are mixed. As with many open source projects, the documentation for getting started is a little rough.  To help with that, here is the list of resources I’ve found most useful so far.

CakePHP Tutorials

IBM’s Cake Tutorial – 5 parts, including scaffolding and baking (topics not included in the Cake Book tutorial). Also has section on user authentication. In some ways the blog demo below is a better place to start since it gives you a more complete application quicker, but once you have the basic idea down this is full of good information, and I’ve only gone through part 1 so far…

The Cake Book Blog Tutorial – provides a good step by step guide for making a simple blog, but does not discuss the “bake” command or anything about personalizing the appearance of the site.

List of Cake Tutorials – links to lots of good information, although a lot of it is beyond my level right now. Hopefully I’ll get to the AJAX tutorials and do some nifty stuff.

General Documentation

The Cake Book – seems like it has a lot of useful information, including a guide to the MVC principles.  Some intro material is too basic, and other parts are too advanced, so it is a little hard to find the right pieces.

21 Things – some good tidbits not covered in the docs.