CakePHP that is. Think Ruby on Rails is cool, but maybe too cool? Have a LAMP setup for your websites and don’t want to mess with shell access? This is the right framework for you.

I know a very small bit of PHP. It’s close enough to C (affectionately referred to as a “curly bracket” language) that I can read it, but I’m a bit short in vocabulary (you know, common idioms, standard API’s, etc.). I also know a small bit about how web backends are written, but I’ve never done it professionally so I don’t know on the ins and outs of how best to do redirects, or handle sessions and cookies, or sanitize data for SQL. CakePHP handles most all of that for me.

How cool is it? I wrote the website for playMockingbird.com this weekend. That’s all while learning CakePHP, taking a refresher course in PHP itself, designing the site, doing the CSS, and writing the web services for our tool to interact with. CakePHP helped with all of that and I finished the job in about 20 hours.

If I started from scratch right now I could probably do it in 10. If I had any decent amount of experience with PHP and CSS (you know, like if I was a professional web developer) I could do it in 5, or maybe less… hell, it could even be a screencast demosntrating it in under an hour.

CakePHP makes it that dead simple.

And the professional web “firms” out there should be ashamed of themselves. We paid out an exorbitant amount of money (you don’t want to know) to hire a good firm here in Austin (I won’t drop names) to build our site. Several months later we had a few decent page designs and some functionality. We pulled the plug and took everything they’d built. Digging through it was a nightmare. I’m sure it made sense to the guy writing it as it looked to be built on some kind of standard framework… but not one I’d seen before (or heard of). And it didn’t work very uniformly.

If they had used CakePHP, in the 100+ engineering hours they billed us for they would have been able to build out the whole website, early and agile (which was the real reason we had to part ways … too old school, not very agile, they were accustomed to building websites for lawyers and doctors and local businesses, not quite ready for the web2.0 world).

So now we changed our job request: it used to be looking for a good web developer with strong PHP chops (or RoR), etc. Now all I want is a good designer, someone who can layout a good HTML page, do good CSS, knock together functional designs in Photoshop… I’ll take care of the engineering.

Do yourself a favor. Go have a piece of cake. Knock up a nice little web 2.0 app this weekend… I did.