On the Refulz.com blog there's a new post looking at some of the new features in CakePHP 2.0 including its use of lazy loading, the CakeEmail library and the new class loader.

With CakePHP 2.0, they have dropped support for PHP 4 and have refactored the library code to make it strictly complaint with PHP 5.2+. Modeled on Ruby on Rails (RoR), CakePHP is a tough competition to Zend framework, Symfony and CodeIgniter.

Besides the topics mentioned above, he also goes into the details of the new CakeRequest and CakeResponse models (to access information about teh current request/response). Summaries of all of the new functionality are provided along with some sample code where needed to illustrate.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a a new tutorial helping you take some first steps with CakePHP, a popular full-stack PHP framework, by Vito Tardia.

CakePHP is a framework that provides a solid base for PHP development. It allows users at any skill level to rapidly develop robust web applications. [...] Personally, the reason why I prefer CakePHP over other PHP frameworks is its better support for console applications. CakePHP has a powerful console tool that can be customized to build applications for both the web and the console world. In this article I'll introduce you to two of CakePHP's most useful features: automatic code generation using the console tool Bake and dynamic scaffolding.

He walks you through the full (user friendly) installation and configuration, a few changes to increase security and where to go to set up your database connection. From there he shows how to use the "Bake" command to generate a "subscribers" model and automatically create the user interfaces to work with it (CRUD operations)

As mentioned on DZone.com, there's a video tutorial series from Andrew Perkins about setting up an authentication system in CakePHP-based applications.

Here you can find the related articles to my Cakephp videos if you would prefer to read them rather than watch. You will can also download all of the source code for the corresponding videos. [...] They only include the app folder, as we'll never change anything in the other folders, at least not in these tutorials.

The videos currently cover installation of the framework and some of the naming conventions to follow. The source has the full authentication system, though - all the way from setting up helper methods to creating the actual authentication component.

In a new post to his blog, Oliver John Tibi has the first part of a series looking at mobile-izing your CakePHP application, making it mobile friendly when a mobile browser is detected.

I'll be writing a short series of posts on how to create a mobile version of your CakePHP app. I've always been bragging to my peers how awesome CakePHP is, and so now I'm writing a short tutorial on how to create a mobile-friendly version of a CakePHP app. I promise to make this as easy as possible.

In this first part of the series he helps you do two things - set up some custom routes for the mobile version of the site ("/m") and add in browser detection using the RequestHandler's "isMobile()" method.

The Bakery (a CakePHP site) has announced the release of CakePHP 2.0, a major shift in the framework with some very large changes to bring it up to the level of other full-stack frameworks currently offered for PHP.

The CakePHP core team is very exited to announce a major jump in the version numbering. CakePHP 2.0 stable is out! we have put endless hours into this release and great ideas have made it into the the framework for this version. [...] The overall CakePHP ecosystem has also been improved. [...] A huge thanks to all involved in terms of both contributions through commits, tickets, documentation edits, and otherwise contribute to the framework. Without you there would be no CakePHP.

Some huge changes have happened in this release including:

• Dropping PHP4 support
• Use of more native PHP functions
• PSR-0 compliance
• Object injection for libraries/components/helpers/etc
• Console tools completely rebuilt
• A move to PHPUnit tests (away from SimpleUnit)
• HTML support in form helpers
• Lazy-loading on just about everything making the overall experience faster
• Several new plugins like: DebugKit, Datasources, MongoDb, Migrations and AclExtras

They've created a few resources to help you get started with this new version including a new version of the book, a screencast and a migration guide.

Abou Kone has a recent post to his blog showing the CakePHP users out there how to set up JSON output for your actions in a few simple steps.

Working on setting up the Rest Plugin for CakePHP helped me realize that i wanted to set up JSON output for some of my actions. This way, if you request for example "www.yourapp.com/app/post/view/1.json" in the url, you will be returned the JSON post data. This excellent tutorial here will help you achieve it.

Changes include updates to configuration for routing, using the RequestHandler component and setting your actions to output the data correctly when the ".json" is detected on the request.

Jonathan Bradley has submitted a handy new helper for the CakePHP users out there that can help to work with Google's Storage in a drop-in plugin - the Simple Google Storage Plugin for CakePHP.

Ever noticed how there is no decent support for CakePHP to utilize Google Storage? Well the wait is over, after realizing that Amazon S3 was just way to unreliable and bloated with spammers and usuage hogs. You can now add Google Storage support to your CakePHP application.

Obviously you'll need to be set up with Google Storage before using it, but the tool makes it as simple as calling publish() to push the data out, return all of the bucket information for your account and pull out information about individual objects. There's also a method that lets you make new buckets on the fly to make categorization simpler.

The heart of the code lies in the Storage class, so if you want to see how it's done, check that first. Other frameworks have their own interfaces with the Google services too, like the Zend Framework's Zend_GData component.

Chris Hartjes has posted a new book review to his blog today of the Packt Publishing release the "CakePHP 1.3 Application Development Cookbook". Like many other traditional "cookbook" style books, it provides a set of solutions to common issues CakePHP developers might come across.

personally find the "cookbook" style of books to be the most helpful. They enable me to quickly find answers to the problem "show me how to do something realistic using your tool". Hello World doesn't cut it for the tools I need to use. [...] Like any well-thought-out book, they cover the main components of CakePHP. One of the thing I liked was that you didn't have to necessarily read the book from front-to-back in order to get something from it.

He mentions other positive things about the book - like the chapter on using the command-line tools that come with CakePHP - and one of the negatives (not so much about the book as it is the CakePHP project's choices).

Leonid Mamchenkov has a quick post to his blog showing how to enable and disable (well, restrict from enabling) CakePHP plugins on the fly - no need to modify config files if you only need it for a certain request.

I am currently working on a rather large project which is based on CakePHP framework. In order to simplify the task, I've broken down the whole application into a number of CakePHP plugins. Now, however, I want to enable/disable plugins on the fly. After a brief search around I couldn't find how to do that. Asking a question at #cakephp IRC channel did it. RabidFire instantly replied with the link that gave me an idea. 30 seconds later I had a working solution.

Since the plugins extend the main AppController, all it took was a beforeFilter() method call that looks at a request parameter for the plugin name, checks against an "allowed" array and throws an exception of it's not found or can't load it.

New on the Query7.com blog there's a tutorial about building a blog with the help of the CakePHP framework. This is the first part of a series they'll be devoting to helping you understand the framework and create the simple blogging application.

If you want to develop a blog from sctrach without using any CMS like WordPress or Drupal, then you've come at the right place! In this series, we will understand how to develop a blog using the CakePHP framework. So, why CakePHP? CakePHP is a robust PHP Framework having an extensive community and excellent documentation. It's based on the MVC pattern, which makes it really simple to use.

This first part of the series focuses on helping you get CakePHP installed and running on your platform.