The PHP Town Hall podcast has posted their fourth episode, "PHP's Vision, Beards, and Cake", with hosts Phil Sturgeon and Ben Edmunds.

We made it to episode 4, past the point of no return! In this episode we are joined by Zack Kitzmiller (owner of an awesome beard) and Jose Diaz-Gonzalez (CakePHP developer extraordinaire) as we argue about PHP's vision and how we think the language should progress in the future.

You can listen to this latest post a few ways - either using the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

Engine Yard has recently posted two podcasts looking at the "Future of PHP" as it relates to two of the popular PHP frameworks out there - CakePHP and Zend Framework 2, as interviewed by Davey Shafik.

The first episode is an interview with some of the core ZF2 contributors about the framework and where they think it's headed. They cover the planned roadmap, targets for next year involving PHP 5.4 and 5.5 as well as how it compares to other frameworks out there today.

In the second episode Davey talks with some of the core contributors (and big fans) of the CakePHP framework. They talk about the current state of the framework, changes in the upcoming version and what it's like working with the PHP-FIG (framework interoperability group).

You can listen to each of these via their in-page players or drop their RSS feed into your reader and get these and the latest episodes of the "Cloud Out Loud" podcast as soon as they're released.

For those out there using the CakePHP framework to create your applications, you might be interested in these quick tips from Juan Basso on the Zumba Engineering Blog for both the architecture and actual code to optimize the performance of the app.

Our site and system has a lot of throughput and it make us use more instances and try to reduce the load in every part. It makes the company happy (save money) and also make the customer happy (faster load). On this article I will go over few things in terms of architecture and some code changes/strategies that could make your application faster as well.

Some of the recommendations include:

• Installing the APC/opcode caching to help save execution time
• Avoiding as many network requests as possible
• Use local file/data caching
• Using the "requestAction" inside controllers with its built-in caching

Wan Qi Chen has returned with the next three parts in his "Background jobs with PHP and resque" series (first parts here) with parts four, five and six helping you implement the concepts from the first three parts.

• Background jobs with php and resque: part 4, managing worker
• Background jobs with php and resque: part 5, creating jobs
• Background jobs with php and resque: part 6, integration into CakePHP

That sixth part of the series uses the CakeRisque plugin to make the integration simpler. Save that, you could integrate this setup pretty easily into whatever framework you choose.

PHPMaster.com has a new tutorial posted sharing a few helpful hints about speeding up CakePHP-driven sites to help squeeze the most performance out of your site.

By applying a few simple modifications, and even some more complex enhancements, CakePHP can be sped up quite a bit. By the time you work your way through even half of these changes, the performance of your your CakePHP site will be comparable to many other popular PHP frameworks, with the advantage that your development speed will never falter!

There's several tips in their list - some a bit more difficult to accomplish than others, but worth the results:

• Upgrade CakePHP Versions
• Disable Debug Mode
• Disable Recursive Find Statements
• Cache Query Results
• Install Memory Based Caching
• Removing Apache and Installing Nginx
• Configure Nginx to use Memcached
• Remove MySQL and Install Percona

For more information on the CakePHP framework, see the project's main site.

In this new tutorial posted to his site Cory Fowler shows you how to set up and deploy a CakePHP-based website to a Microsoft Azure instance.

One day Last week, I set out to get a simple CakePHP site up and running on Windows Azure Web Sites. [...] CakePHP is a framework, which means ideally, there should not be anything specific to get it working on any platform.

He includes a complete guide to getting the framework, a sample "web.config" configuration file (for the Azure instance) and links to some other guides to help you get started using Azure (like deployment with git).

The Bakery (the CakePHP site) has posted a list of things to come in the 3.0 release of the popular PHP framework.

Since its creation, more than 7 years ago, CakePHP has grown with a life of its own. Its main goal has always been to empower developers with tools that are both easy to learn and use, leverage great libraries requiring low documentation and low dependencies too. We've had several big releases along these years and an ever growing community. Being one of the most popular frameworks out there and probably the first one (!) we have also gotten a lot of criticism from the developer community in general. We have, though, accepted it and learnt from our mistakes to keep building the best PHP framework there is.

Some of the coming improvements include:

• Drop support for 5.2.x and support 5.4+ only
• Use traits were possible and makes sense
• Model layer rewrite
• Improve Router
• Improve bootstrapping process to allow more developer control and better performance

You can find more about the current features of the framework on it's main project site.

On The Bakery they've officially announced CakeFest 2012, happening in Manchester, UK from August 30th through September 2nd (some days are conference sessions, others are training).

CakeFest is the annual CakePHP Conference. It brings together developers, users, and interested parties from all over the world for a four day event filled with workshops, talks, dinners, social events and plenty of fun! If you are interested in giving a talk at CakeFest, we still have submissions open! Just head over to the CakeFest, sign up and submit your talk proposal via your account page! We're open to anyone for submissions, and we'd love to hear your ideas!

You can also purchase tickets to this year's event (with a discount for students) ranging from $420 USD for just the conference out to $950 for the conference + tutorial days. They'll have talks from core CakePHP developers, time for lightening talks and a panel discussion where you can ask your own questions of the Core development team. You can get complete details about this event on the conference website.

On the Design Aeon blog there's a new post sharing a CakePHP component that can be used to easily add searching to your framework-based application.

Cake Php Search Component is used to implement search in your cake php projects.The component provide highly reusability. component is meant to use across all the controllers. you just include this search component in your Controller and call a component function to fetch your conditions types in search form and refine the data .

The component (available for download here) is simple to install and full instructions for implementing it are included in the post - including it in the controller, creating search and pagination elements, making a controller action and finally making a view to tie it all together.

On the Refulz blog they've posted the next in their series about access control in CakePHP applications. In this new article they look at Access Request Objects (AROs) and Access Control Objects (ACOs) and how they can be managed via the built-in ACL functionality.

Continuing with Access Control Lists, we will read about the two Access Control Lists and their mapping. The Access Request Objects (AROs) are a list of the things that seek permissions and the Access Control Objects (ACOs) are the resources on which permissions are required. Both the lists are maintained in the tow tables, namely aros and acos respectively.

Included in the post is the SQL you'll need to create the tables for the system to use as well as some basic code to use the AclComponent with the ACOs/AROs. They also show how to use the parentNode method to create parent/child relationships between the objects.