CakePHP, opinions?

[lucas572]

Hi all,

I’m working on a new project for Uni and I’m stuck between hacking WordPress into doing what I need it to, or dev-ing using CakePHP instead.

To save some explanation time, here’s a static (and unfinished!) mock-up of the site I’m talking about to give you an idea of my intentions: [Spidr](http://spidr.lukeseager.com/ “Spidr”).

Has anyone here ever used CakePHP before? I kind of like the sound of it because it uses PHP, but also tries to emulate the structure of Ruby on Rails, which (I hear) is great for displaying content specific to each individual user (Twitter and SoundCloud are good examples of this).

I’m a little tentative to use Cake though because I’m not exactly proficient with PHP yet and I can see me having to *try* and write a lot of custom code as the community doesn’t look that large. Whereas WP has a lot of plug-ins that could get me going, I just worry about hitting a wall in terms of functionality that I may be able to avoid with Cake.

So, anyone have experience with Cake? What did you make? How did you find using the framework?

[Alen]

What limitations did you run in with WordPress?

> I just worry about hitting a wall in terms of functionality that I may be able to avoid with Cake.

How can you confidently say that without having worked with CakePHP?

What functionality does your project require?

[lucas572]

I’m not confidently saying anything in this post :) I am yet to dev in WordPress for this project, I’m just thinking through my options before I start coding, I don’t want to spend hours hacking WP to find I hit a wall, when I could have spent time learning an alternative (like Cake).

Here’s my thought process for WP.

1. I need a subscription based registration (can be done with a plug-in, easy).

2. I need to be able to limit the amount of searches a user can do based on their package (again, subscription
plugin should do this).

3. I need to make a fully custom backend for the users (not the standard WP backend)
– Each user should be able to fill out the ‘Start’ form. That information can then be sent to a scraper, and have the results return to the individual users dashboard with the results and some stats/charts etc. shown.
– Users should be able to edit their profiles/upgrade/downgrade etc. (again, plugin can be used for this).

My main concern in being able to display the correct search results back to each user. Plug-ins like S2 member get me part way in getting me there, but they’re made more for restricting posts and pages, not dynamic content that comes from outside WordPress itself. Which makes me think I need a custom solution built on another framework.

[Alen]

I wouldn’t rely on plug-ins for all that functionality in WP. So my suggestion would be to start with CakePHP. Although, I haven’t used CakePHP before, I would imagine it’s similar to Laravel PHP framework (my preferred framework).

[Author]

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