The Bakery Everything CakePHP

Many people familiar with the project know that PhpNut took over as the lead developer in July 2005. Since that time he has been instrumental in driving the project forward, from setting up the svn to handling contributions and contributing a lot of great code of his own. In August 2005, Nate joined the project and he too began contributing to the code that became 1.0. I was invited into the role of project manager in Oct 2005, where I set out to spread the good word and build the community. For the rest of 2005 and 2006, PhpNut and I worked extensively on everything that happened with the CakePHP project. We built the Bakery, so users would have a place to share knowledge. We established CakeForge, so the community would have a place to build applications on CakePHP. I built the Bin, so IRC users could help each other easily. We spent countless hours in IRC helping the community. We formed the Cake Software Foundation, so the project would live on forever.

CakePHP has become a tremendous success. The success should be directly attributed to the greater community who share our vision. We have put in a tremendous amount of work, but none of it would happen without the community. As project manager, I hear a lot of things, I see a lot of things, I talk to lots of people and I try to look at the project from a broader perspective. I try to be as objective as possible, always keeping in mind that what is best for the community is best for CakePHP. The best thing for the community in 2005-2006 was a stable release. We released 1.0 on May 1, 2006. Shortly thereafter we moved to 1.1 and this has been the stable version for close to 2 years.

CakePHP 1.2 brought with it a lot of changes with the dev release on Christmas Day 2006 and finally the beta version on New Year's Day 2007. While the feature set of 1.2 dominates any other framework, we have been slow to reach a stable release. Nate took a much larger role in the development of the 1.2 core and I contributed some new features. We have taken in more community contributions and involved more people in 2007 than any year before. We had our first pure CakePHP gathering and introduced CakePHP to many new developers.

We are all very passionate about the code, the community, and the philosophy behind this framework. Our passion is shared by the community and the larger team that has formed over the last few years. We are truly dedicated to producing the best framework and with this in mind the team is now evolving along with the code. The evolving team will still include the core team, with me as Project Manager helping to usher in new developers and provide opportunity for more people to get involved, PhpNut acting in an advisor's role, ensuring that the right code gets implemented and more people learn the magic of CakePHP, Nate taking the lead role in the implementation of the core code, and John continuing to lead the documentation efforts. If you are interested in how the rest of the team is evolving, keep an eye on the Trac contributors page [1]. We are all committed to this new structure, with more respect, more trust, and more opportunity for growth.

We are excited to share with you all developments and we see a great future the CakePHP community. Stay tuned for more new developments and expect the next 1.2 release in the coming weeks.

Bake On.

[1] https://trac.cakephp.org/wiki/Contributors