On the Sanisoft blog there's a recent post that gives you a step-by-step guide to working with themes in the upcoming version 3 release of the CakePHP framework.

Almost every application I code has themes which either the end user can change or the admin can set or can be changed on the fly. Doing all these things was easy in CakePHP 2.x. With the first alpha release of CakePHP 3.x I was naturally keen to try out how theming worked with V3.

He shows how to convert an existing theme into one that will be compatible with the 3.x version of the framework. He breaks it down into seven steps (well, technically eight) to make it easier to follow along:

• Step 0: Make the "posts" table
• Step 1: Bake the model, controller and views for the Posts
• Step 2: Bake in the "Twit" plugin
• Step 3: Download and install the Twitter Bootstrap
• Step 4: Create the "default.ctp" file with the content given
• Step 5: Make the "index.ctp" template with the given content
• Step 6: Add the line to the AppController to use the new theme
• Step 7: Reload and verify the results