CakePHP: the community driven framework

We’ve been very busy, and have a lot to show for it. Late last year we created the Community Center, as a central location for everyone to find their way around, and help people get involved with the project. This year we launched My CakePHP, as a hub for developers to create a profile, and unify the experience across all of our sites. The Cake Software Foundation website also received a well overdue facelift. Additionally, after continuous requests, and with a little help from CakeDC, we improved the schedule for the official CakePHP training, which is now provided on a regular basis.

Earlier this year we also announced our agreement with Microsoft to make CakePHP available on Windows Azure. That doesn’t mean you can’t get your piece of the cake on other platforms, such as Rackspace’s Cloud Sites, Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk or RedHat’s OpenShift, as well as other PaaS providers, like Pagoda Box or Fortrabbit. There’s a lot to choose from.

It was also great to see that, since our efforts last year to extend the reach of the CakePHP community, both the Facebook interest page and our official Twitter account have reached over 10,000 likes and followers each. The official group on Facebook also surpassed 3,000 members, becoming even larger than groups for other major PHP frameworks. But the growth didn’t stop there. We had almost 1 million more visits to the CakePHP sites compared to last year, with the CookBook seeing nearly an additional 10 million page views, reaching over 26 million. For more numbers and stats check out this year’s community keynote.

Which takes us to San Francisco, USA, where we held CakeFest 2013, the annual conference dedicated to everything CakePHP. Over 80 developers from around the world joined us for 4 days of workshops and conference. We listened to your feedback from the previous year and broke the workshop schedule into beginner and advanced sessions over the first 2 days. This was then followed by another 2 days of 16 talks given by 12 international speakers, as well as keynotes, lightning talks, core team Q, and the raffle. We took away some really memorable moments, the best of all being the “Hour of Contribution”, where we saw everyone contributing to the project for an hour, in true open source fashion. It was a beautiful sight, and a humbling experience. Oh, and who could forget about the cake!

But wait, there’s more. Work has been going strong on version 3.0 of CakePHP, with the new ORM almost ready for it’s first developer preview release. The roadmap is slowly being completed, with the milestone available for anyone to join in on the fun. In the meantime, this year saw the release of versions 2.3 and 2.4 of the framework, with a sum of 28 releases in total. There’s also been a lot of activity in the developer community, with almost 6,000 additional questions tagged on Stack Overflow this past year alone. We also saw some interesting projects released, a couple of videos, interviews and books published, a few useful tools, as well as some nice cheat sheets. Not to mention some great initiatives, and of course, an honorable mention to core member Jose Gonzalez, who delivered a total of 25 successive posts on his blog as part of his CakePHP advent series. For all our Japanese developers, there was a similar series created previous years.

Overall, 2013 was an amazing year, and one to be proud of as a member of the community! A big thank you goes out to everyone who has been involved and helped make CakePHP what it is - a framework built by the community! Thank you.