[ruby_roo]

Would be awesome to hear from a Rails developer how Cake compares to what we have in Ruby land.

I still have to build and maintain the odd PHP app now and again. Is cake worth my while to learn? Or would I be better off with something like Zend Framework if I had to choose?

[fwez]

I'd say definitely give Cake a serious look. It was a steep learning curve for me at the beginning. The documentation leaves much to be desired compared to other PHP frameworks, but it's getting better. I've never had any major complaints about CakePHP and have been using it for multiple personal and school (scientific research) projects. Recently the lead developer and the project manager left the project and started the Li3 project (http://li3.rad-dev.org/). I did not perceive a change in the rate and quality of CakePHP's core development as a result of that.

[jamongkad]

Personally I would go for either CodeIgniter or it's more well built cousin Kohana.

[warfangle]

Thanks for the tipoff to kohana- as a past CI user I've looked for something similar but not bogged down like cake is.

Of course, I've recently begun to climb the fence to greener pastures (scala/lift), but clients still like php no matter how I loathe it :)

[jamongkad]

Word...though I think you'd be pleased to know that Kohana is one of the better engineered PHP code bases out there.