We've been working for a while on a RoR project. Originally it came in as a really high concept idea - the spec was more like a film treatment than a functional spec. [...] So we set out to build a prototype in six weeks. We are known as a PHP shop, although of our web dev, about half is in PHP and the other half in Perl. At the time we had working for us a very talented Rails guru, so we thought we'd give it a try.

Unfortunately, their "Rails Guru" moved on to more Ruby pastures so they've been left with maintaining the application. Laura, being one of the team, has learned a few things about the language that's caused an internet craze:

• It makes getting started easy. This is what it's famous for.
• As things get more complicated, the ideal of convention over configuration starts to get in your way.
• The documentation sucks. This is however, improving.
• The community support is really immature.
• Learning to debug apps is really really hard to begin with.

CakePHP is very new, so documentation beyond the basics is a bit sparse in areas. I built this website entirely using CakePHP and took notes along the way to share with others. While some of these items can be found in obvious places like the manual, others required a bit of elbow grease to figure out. My name is Matt Inman and your feedback is welcome, feel free to email me with questions or comments.

Things learned that are on the list include:

• Easily creating static pages
• Static pages - Adjusting other data sent to the layout
• Viewing the SQL queries that are running behind the scenes
• Using bake.php
• Complex model validation
• Creating a controller that uses other models
• Call exit() after redirecting