Foreword

It's been almost 10 years now since I first worked on what would be known as CakePHP, one of the most popular PHP frameworks available today. Over the years, I've been involved and have also seen through other developers how it's evolved and advanced with contributions from the amazing community that's grown up around the project. I'm so proud of all the work that has gone into the framework; this work has helped make it such a powerful contender when it comes to choosing an open source solution.

As the latest version of the framework, 2.5 represents the best of CakePHP to date, and truly reflects the goals we had right from the very beginning: to make building web applications simpler, faster, and require less code. I believe we've done a lot to keep this promise in making CakePHP a framework that really is an "out-of-the-box" solution, while also maintaining a strong backward compatibility, which allows developers to keep using it without worrying about us totally abandoning legacy or significantly changing the code base they know best and love.

We've also been very serious about maintaining a migration path so that our community can move between versions of the framework, providing not only a clear outline of the new features and updates expected between versions, but also a migration shell, which handles most of the work for you. This has always been a trademark of CakePHP that I've been consistent in supporting, as it sends a clear message to our community that we have no intentions of leaving anyone behind and think about them every step of the way.

There's no doubt that the community drive behind CakePHP is what makes it such a popular option in the PHP framework's space, and it has been the principal factor in determining its success. If you're looking to build a great web application in record time that supports industry standards and common integrations through thousands of plugins, while also being backed by extensive documentation and a thorough API reference as well as a huge community for support and discussion, then look no further than CakePHP.

This book will help you jump right in and get a clear idea of how the framework can solve those typical issues you'll encounter when building an application. It provides a great head-first dive into CakePHP and will advance your knowledge of the framework by approaching the problems that will likely matter most early on.

Larry Masters

Founder of CakePHP