Title says it all. I am no longer tracking the CakePHP project and therefore my CakePHP modifications project is now officially dead. This is mostly due to time constraints but there are other reasons as well. I will not go into the details for the other reasons but those who know me already know what those reasons are.

Of course, hosting for these patches continues as well as my ThemeableView class which some CakePHP users out there found useful. If anyone else is interested in taking the reins for this class, please feel free to do so. No need to contact me or anything, but a trackback to this post would be nice so that I will know who is currently maintaining this class. This will allow me to direct them to you for any updates that you may post.

On another note, the project that has been taking much of my time lately is a new website for posting free online classified ads for cars, trucks, and bikes. This website is currently US-centric. We have plans to extend worldwide if all goes well with the current setup. So, if you’re in the US and you wish to sell your vehicle, or if you’re looking to buy a preowned car, truck, or bike check out PreOwnedCar.com. If you know someone with the same needs, please tell them about this site.

We are also currently in the final design phases for PhilWeavers Version 4. I am currently divided between doing this new version using Django as a base or simply going back to the drawing board and creating a new PHP5-based framework. We’ll see how this pans out in the later stages of development.

I have been working with the Django Web framework for close to two months now and I’m loving it. Not so much for the free admin interface, but for the sheer ease of development that it provides. For the first time, I cared more about how my models are designed and not how they are laid out and implemented in the database. For the two projects that I am working on, I have yet to write a custom SQL statement under Django.

It makes me wish CakePHP offered more when it comes to object-relational mapping. How I wish it was as simple as defining your models and running php cake/scripts/bake.php syncdb. CakePHP does it the other way around: you create the database first and then use cake/scripts/bake.php to create your models and views.

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I’m going to take a break from my CakePHP modifications project. I am currently working on a project using the Python-powered framework, [Django][django]. Needless to say, just like CakePHP it’s been improving with each and every iteration. Though it’s not even in “1.0″ yet, the features it currently sports are very impressive and, dare I say, inspiring! However, PHP has been my bread and butter for close to 3 years now. Though I have so many gripes with PHP as a language, I still find it useful and it still gets the job done.

CakePHP modifications will continue once I finish my current project and once CakePHP 1.2.x.x gets sorted out.

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I have been doing some recent profiling on CakePHP, the results look good despite the large amount of bootstrap code that it has to run with each request. However, I have observed one thing about the framework that could pose problems on servers with heavy traffic: the bootstrap process loads model class files even if the models are not used in the duration of the request.

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