Our decision to toss out our in-house PHP Framework FIZZI and start from scratch with CakePHP was not taken lightly. The time, effort and development costs are nothing to the future costs of maintaining and upgrading FIZZI. Simply put, let’s get out of the Framework Business and focus on our core process and system strengths!

Installation of CakePHP

No matter how trivial the Cake Developers made the installation process, I simply can’t brush over this step because I’m a dumb ass. I installed CakePHP on a server with an older version of PHP (4.2). After mucking with the initialization script to set up the include paths correctly, CakePHP was bombed out in a session function that was introduced in PHP 4.3.

I know, I should have read the minimal requirements, but what Software Developer really reads yet implements the requirements? So I had to install it on a server with PHP 4.3+ or PHP 5+. That implies either upgrading our in-house test server and possible breaking ongoing development on other projects, use a virtual server on my desktop or just go for broke and install it on a existing domain at a hosted server.

After the trial and error of installing CakePHP on our test server, installation on the hosted server was a breeze! Three lines of code in the initialization file and three parameters in the database file need changing. Load the home page with success! Ideally, if you had the capability to install cake in /usr/local/src, you should install it there. This will make system-wide upgrades easier in the future especially if you are planning to use CakePHP for more than one project.

So today I’m starting out with a positive outlook and tossing out our in-house PHP Framework (FIZZI) that we’ve been using for MustFindit and replacing it with CakePHP. It’s taking too long to develop MustFindit and extending and adapting FIZZI for MustFindit’s requirements will basically kill the project.

Why CakePHP? I’ve considered Rails, Symfony and quite a few more; however, CakePHP seems like the best fit with our current technology, design and knowledge base for a MVC architecture. This is a big plus since we want to expedite development process and keep the learning curve down as much as possible.

Over the next few days, I hope to present our findings on CakePHP and if it is a viable Development Framework for PHP and our projects.