I should write more. I noticed that I since I decided to take a break from zZine Magazine I more or less stopped writing – and started baking again with CakePHP. As a result I finally recoded this website and refreshed a little bit my almost-rusty baking skills.

Why not taking advantage of this and write more about CakePHP then? After all, my last article turned out well enough and some people even bookmarked it online on del.icio.us and ma.gnolia… Now it's a bit out of date, I must admit: it was based on a pre-beta release of the framework, and we're (more or less) stable now.
A lot of things changed in the Bakers Community since then! At the time the wiki barely started and there was no manual whatsoever, only my long and perhaps slightly boring article describing Cake's functionalities. Now there things are much better for newcomers: they have a continuously growing community to rely upon, both on the Google user group and on IRC (#cakephp on FreeNode counted 63 members today, while back in the day 20 was a big number). There are also a few people who started blogging and starting websites about CakePHP: while I was the first to write an article about Cake I was the last so far to start a blog :/ Oh well, nobody's perfect!

The first site I came across – although not a blog really – is Graham Bird's Cake for Beginners. When someone asks me some basic questions about CakePHP I send him there because first of all they'll find a short FAQ about the framework, i.e. something everybody should know before even start thinking about learning Cake. Similarly, the guy has a Glossary in progress to help those souls who feel lost in Cake's terminology. If you don't consider yourself a total beginner anymore, the Tutorials section can be a very interesting read: I wanted to add some AJAX bits to my site, but the documentation about this seemed pretty scarce, so I headed to the Ajax Task List tutorial and it really helped.

On the blogs front, on the other hand, Cake Baker seems to be the most active: I'm starting to check this one often (OK, I'd better subscribe to the RSS feeds, perhaps) because it seems to be THE best place to get the latest news about everything concerning CakePHP: The author seems to post quite frequently (there's always a new post every 1-3 days maximum) includes short code snippets when necessary and report news when there's anything to report.

Sentino is also an interesting place to learn new things about CakePHP: the only problem is that the author seems to post less frequently… the blog seems to have some sort of “milestone” schedule, publishing something when there's something big enough to justify a post. If you want to subscribe to a less frequent blog with only the essentials about Cake, this is a good choice.

RosSoft unlike the others mentioned up to now has a much more technical approach: no news about Cake or anything, just some REALLY useful real-world example of Cake helpers, components etc. etc., with FULL source code to cut and paste. Really handy if you need something specific, truly excellent for beginners to have a look at how Cake classes should be written.
Among the most interesting fully working snippets:
IP-to-country component
Poor man's cron component
Image Auth – CAPTCHA component

ThinkingPHP is another “technical” Cake blog, with interesting code snippets and thoughts about our favourite PHP framework. For those who don't know or don't remember him (yes, like me…), he's the author of SpliceIt!… what?

SpliceIt!'s mission is to provide a clean and light-weight code base for people who want to create complex webapps faster then ever. The things we want to provide are:
– User/Right Managment
– Theming Support
– i18n
– Url Aliasing
– and most notabily: Modularization of often used Code Segments

i.e. something I should have checked before recoding this website. I'll definitely keep this in mind for the next release of h3rald.com.

Posts@ rd11 a.k.a. gwoo [and seth]‘s blog. Moment of silence. Gwoo is CakePHP's project manager (respect+) and one of the lead developers of CakePHP and he also actually uses Cake for his website and blog instead of WordPress :)
What can I write about him. It's difficult. I'll avoid all possible pseudo-religious comparisons but when I say that he created CakePHP I think I say it all. The code he used for his blog is part of a collection of open-source, Cake-powered tools all prefixed with rd- or Cake, available on CakeForge. I personally think that looking at his sample applications can be one of the best way to learn how to bake properly, and yes, I did check them out before coding this site for the second time. Demos are online.

That's it. These are perhaps the most well-known bakers and/or Cake bloggers on the planet. There are certainly others, maybe even in other languages, but now I'd better stop writing now, because this is a rather long blog post. Sorry. I'm new to blogging and I just can't help myself: especially with Cake, I need to write lenghty texts!
More to come…