Hi all, This is my first post here and I must confess I am somewhat of a Cake newbie. I am however an experienced PHP developer, and web-designer. I have spent many years dabbling in a number of CMS systems from Nuke to CPG-Nuke to Joomla to Xoops to Drupal.
They all have their various pro's and con's (some more con's than pro's) but I think very few are easy to implement and customize without a huge learning curve. I must say I was very excited when I came across the cake framework as I have spent some time working in ASP.NET and really liked Ruby on Rails but was reluctant to try and learn ANOTHER language just to derive the benefit of an MVC architecture on an Open Source platform. The Cake Software Foundation is obviously a dedicated group of developers and by and large I think the cake project is managed and presented very professionally and indeed very well. I think it is porabably obvious to all of us that cake provides the tools to build some very exciting (I'm tempted to say Web 2.0 but I'm not a big fan of buzz-words) web-based apps. That said I think Cake has a huge amount of untapped potential. This brings me to my proposal. I'm sure many of you are familiar with PEAR. The PHP Extension and Application repository. Essentially a structured and managed repository of PHP scripts designed to fulfill everyday tasks. The code is all written according to strict conventions and all extensions are part of an extensive hierarchy of dependencies. You may say that Cake has the CakeForge. I disagree. CakeForge serves it's purpose as a meeting place for Cake Developers to share ideas and code snippets. It also hosts cake based projects and initially I would anticipate the Cake EAR being hosted on Cake Forge. What the EAR would have that Cake Forge does not is a strict dependency map/hierarchy. In other words if I develop a Blogging extension that requires the User Managment extension this dependency is explicitly specified. In the same way as PEAR has extended the PHP language the Cake EAR would do the same for Cake. It would be structure and controlled. In this way we prevent repetition and confusion. Why should developers scour through CakeForge picking and choosing between 5 different components that do the same thing when they would be better served accessing the the Cake EAR finding the single extension that they require. They can then rest assured that this extension has been co- developed and refined by a number of developers and coded according to the strict coding conventions and best practices as specified by the Cake EAR requirements. Each extension will be, essentially, a separate project. Bugs and Feature requests will be addressed as they arise and contributions will be incorporated into the code as they are presented. At the end of the day Cake has the potential to be RAD developers great weapon and we can't expect all the features that every website would like (Blog, User management, Gallery etc) to be bundled into the core of Cake so why not have easily pluggable, well documented and reliable extensions stored in a well organized structured repository with a finite dependency hierarchy and a clear development road map? Obviously it is early days and I wanted to really feel the waters first and see if anyone is interested in joining me on my quest to establish a strong Cake EAR. If you've read this far you must have some opinion on the matter... --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Cake PHP" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
