There are at least 20 PHP MVC frameworks and trying to break each one down into its component strengths and weaknesses would be foolish.  Each one tries, on some level, to outdo the others through the combination of features catering to some niche audience.  Having been a consumer of everything from Code Igniter to Zend Framework and beyond I can honestly say that no single PHP framework is the “best” or is even deserving of such a title.

This tutorial will walk you though setting up a functioning Windows-Apache-PHP-MySQL + CakePHP installation on Windows XP.  This tutorial should also work for Windows 2000 or Vista, but since I’m not testing in that environment you should know that this was written with Windows XP in mind.

There are thousands of high quality Wordpress Themes available on the internet. In fact, there are so many that only the prolific number of sites powered by Wordpress could even come close to re-using them all. The theme I was using was supposed to be temporary when I put it in place in mid-2007. Here it is 2008 and I was still on it. I had to change it to give my site it’s own look.

An interesting topic about CakePHP migration support was raised in the CakePHP discussion group recently. Dardo Sordi wrote a compelling and comprehensive argument in favor of not using migrations in favor of CakePHP’s built in Schema tool. He provided an excellent overview of the tool and a suggested workflow for how he currently uses it in his work.

I decided to give the recent Symfony 1.1.0 RC1 a try on my macbook. Here are the steps I took to get it working.