In his his latest blog entry, Felix Geisendörfer makes a recommendation for anyone working with the CakePHP framework. He suggests doing something that most might avoid - diving into the source to find out how things work.

When hanging out in #cakephp I usally try to answer questions people have as good as I can. A lot of the times I have no idea what the answer is and in most cases the fastest way to find out is by looking at the core code. Ok, the manual is pretty decent these days and I would recommend most people to look for an answer in there first. But if you take the time to study the core code, you'll be able to answer almost any question by yourself, no matter if it has been answered somewhere before.

He talks about other advantages like finding those hidden, undocumented features already supported by the framework. Since this is the first part of the series, he just looks at how to get into the source. He starts off with the basic index.php file that comes installed with the distribution and a chunk of code that helps run the index file and is at the heart of how CakePHP works - the Dispatcher.