As Digg_ points out, the first stable version of CakePHP was released, yesterday. I should have posted yesterday about it, and no, I didn't forget: I was just busy downloading the new version, have a look at the new site, talk to people etc.

Anyhow, it's ready, just baked and smells damn good. Go get it if you didn't already, it's available at the usual place, even this time you won't be disappointed. CakePHP now reached the 1.0 milestone, in a way which reminds me a lot about Mozilla Firefox: a lot of people were already using it before it went stable officially!

The CakePHP Team has been humble enough not to declare their product stable before the time. I personally considered CakePHP stable enough since RC2… and considering that this site and many others have been built on alpha, beta and RC version, I think people can get an idea of Cake's reliability.
Nothing (too) new came out the oven this time: CakePHP 1.0 is mainly a bugfix release, with all the features we've learnt to love. It's just better_: a lot of things have been fixed, model associations work better, etc. etc. You can read the changelog/announcementid=85 or have a look below for a quick summary of the new features and most interesting fixes:

Revision: [2420]
Added fix for Ticket #320.
Fixed Model::save() so it will only allow a model to save itself.
Fixed Model::save() when saving a HABTM association

Revision: [2437]
Adding fix for Model::findNeighbours().
Was returning all associations and fields. Now recursive
is set to 0 and only returns the prev and next keys array

Revision: [2456]
"Enables use of Controller::$data in addition to Controller::$params['data']"

Revision: [2490]
Fixing a bug that occurs when connecting to two different
databases on the same server, and enabling cross-database
model associations

Revision: [2491]
Adding Microsoft SQL Server driver [EXPERIMENTAL]

Revision: [2577]
Adding $alias property to enable future Oracle support

Revision: [2625]
Bringing all DB drivers up to date

Revision: [2653]
Adding check for custom error class in app/.
Added check for AppController::appError(); will be called if this method 
is in AppController.

If you're not too excited about this new release, maybe you should have a look at www.cakephp.org. Different? Damn right it is: it looks like someone listened to our prayers for a new website design. The merciful soul is Armando Sosa, the winner of CakePHP's design contest. He's a latin-american web designer who had the GREAT idea of thinking about an innovative design for the Cake site… Actually my dad didn't think that way: “That's not new, that way of advertising was all over the place when I was a kid!” And he's right, Armando thought that a fifties-like template would have been perfect for Cake. Forget all the smooth, roundy-and-chubby, toons-like “official” Web 2.0 designs (beta), the new Cake site needs to stand out of the crowd…

Heyyy! Well done guys…