Welcome to The Cookbook

We’re a big fan of convention over configuration. While it takes a bit of time to learn CakePHP’s conventions, you save time in the long run: by following convention, you get free functionality, and you free yourself from the maintenance nightmare of tracking config files. Convention also makes for a very uniform system development, allowing other developers to jump in and help more easily.

CakePHP’s conventions have been distilled out of years of web development experience and best practices. While we suggest you use these conventions while developing with CakePHP, we should mention that many of these tenets are easily overridden–something that is especially handy when working with legacy systems.