I know that I said I was intent on never programming in PHP again, but that’s what our company uses and that’s what WordPress is written in. 

When I reviewed CakePHP, the Zend Framework was very young (I think it was like version 0.6). It’s now in version 1.5 and very capable. It has all the Model-View-Controller (MVC) components as well as a plethora of web services libraries that were very easy to implement. In just a few hours, I took the YouTube library and created a topic specific video browser on my other blog. The documentation was good and there is plenty of community support.

I like how it stores the core code of your application out of the path of what is publicly browsable. It gives it a more clean secure feel. I also like that installation basically consists of copy one directory to your web server – however, it only runs on PHP 5. Caching in the Zend Framework is just a few lines of code, making it a no brainer when it comes to web services.

It does have a few trade offs. It doesn’t have scaffolding or auto form creation like the other’s have. It’s newly implemented Forms library is a little cumbersome. It’s database support, while varied, feels less than integrated.

I think all in all, it’s a great framework. I haven’t touched Cake since 1.1, so I can’t compare it to their current version. I would recommend it to any PHP developer. If you are interested, check out Killer PHP’s tutorials.

Anyone compared it to the latest version of CakePHP? Any new PHP frameworks out there that rock and roll?