Chris Hartjes has started up a new series on his blog about converting legacy applications over to shiny, new CakePHP framework versions.

In my rapidly dwidling spare time I have been working on a project to convert an existing site for a legal services company over to PHP. I'm *this* close to being done, so I thought I'd share what I went through to get to where I am right now. [...] So after giving the code review I was asked to do the rewrite. The client realized that they had some serious maintenance issues on their hands and were in the process of creating a new look-and-feel for the site. Being the framework guy that I am, I indicated that porting the code over to a framework would be the best way to reduce maintenance issues going forward.

The series will document the process he followed to convert the application over. In part two he'll get into the meat of things - reworking the database structure.