Baking a new CakeArticle

Too right. Enough being a lazy writer, it's time to seriously produce something. I could sit here and pretend that long blog posts can make up for the lack of new articles, but I'd like to write something proper and new. Judging by the latest stats people come here hoping to find either a blog entirely devoted to CakePHP or some CakePHP related content. Well, actually they can find quite a bit, but I'd like to be able to sport more Cake-related articles, bookmarks, and posts. My main problem is that I could add ten bookmarks about Cake right away, but the latest addition showed on the front page would feature only bookmarks, which would be bad (yes, I do worry about silly things). At the moment this blog is the second easiest way to provide fresh content frequently enough to encourage visitors to come back, but articles could be even better.

Without further ado, I hereby announce that I am working on some new articles on CakePHP, at least one. I'd like to write something technical about CakePHP's advanced features, because that's where the current documentation is lacking, at the moment: associations, caching, some advanced components… they are topics which seem to interest those bakers who already baked their first cake and are now looking for some more icing.

Interested? Good! Sadly, that's not what I'm going to write now, at least not the first article I'll be releasing. Please stop calling me names, there's no need to say that I'm just a lazy coward who doesn't want to get his hands dirty and write some tough stuff. And stop pulling those sad faces! Think about… new bakers. There are new people learning about Cake and I know there are, I just discovered one yesterday almost by chance: he seems to be really enthusiastic about Cake, judging by his latest post (OK, nevermind the pic).
Those people are mostly more-or-less experienced PHP programmers who want to find an answer to all their development problems and annoyance. Well, my good friends, the answer lies in Cake. Cake can save us all and bestow powerful blessings of Good PHP Design and Well-structured Programming upon our messy spaghetti code!

I almost considered writing a humorous article about Cake, but luckily I changed my mind. My old CakePHP article is already a few months old and was written when Cake was in pre-beta. I feel it's time for a more up-to-date howto and introduction to our framework, something maybe not as lenghty but easily readable by almost anyone interested in starting to learn about Cake.

Baking lessons. Yes, that's it. I'm currently writing an article divided in ten lessons which could potentially turn casual cowboy coders into (apprentice) bakers. That could be easy for those already enlightened by OOP and MVC, and perhaps more difficult for others: at any rate, I'll try my best.