CakePHP was originally born as an attempt to port the architecture and functionality offered by "Ruby on Rails":http://www.rubyonrails.com/ to PHP, something which various other frameworks have tried to do in different ways. Although Cake has many similarities with the popular Ruby framework, it's currently evolving independently: it's not an actual port - that would be close to impossible, considering the features offered by Ruby itself which are not present in PHP - but rather a very PHP-specific implementation of Rails' architecture and RAD philosophy. CakePHP separates itself from the rest of the PHP world by concentrating on simplicity, portability, flexibility and scalability. CakePHP does not require any additional libraries like PEAR or Propel. CakePHP includes an architecture that allows for easily extending its many built-in features through components and helpers. All this in under 300K.

The only really important concept to grasp is its MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture, which is actually common to many other PHP frameworks - including, recently, the Zend's. If you're new to this very intuitive and yet powerful concept, imagine to logically divide your web application in a few major sections (controllers), like a blog, a photo gallery and so on. Each section will obviously have access to one or more tables in your database (models) and will also include some template files (views) used to present content to the users. This may be a quite informal but concrete representation of the MVC architecture, using a real-world example. In other words, controller files handle your application's business logic, keeping it separate from the code used to represent the datasource (model) and the presentation layer (view). This separation may seem a bit too strict at first - you may be tempted to try including some business logic in your views, for example - but will be able to increase your code maintainability in the long term.

CakePHP can be freely downloaded from the official site and requires no installation at all: just extract the content of the compressed archive file into a public directory of your webserver to deploy the framework and your project's skeleton. The directory structure of CakePHP is designed to be easy to understand and well defined for intetlligent code seperation:

To an extent, even someone who is not familiar with CakePHP can understand roughly where each particular file should be placed. There are three first level folders: cake containing the framework itself, app which hosts an empty project and vendors which can be used for third-parties libraries. It's worth noting that when creating a project with CakePHP you'll never have to touch the contents of the cake folder: the framework's source code is always kept separated by the user project. One of the most important part of Rails' philosophy Cake ported to PHP is convention over configuration, in fact there's no need for dozens of configuration files or no hidden settings to configure: the framework knows where everything is and it's smart enough to load the appropriate classes depending on a particular task, and of course a fixed directory structure plays a key role for this smart behaviour.

There are only two configuration files which can be modified, one is app/config/core.php and contains various application settings like the debug level, session timeout, etc., and the other - app/config/database.php - is necessary to establish a (persistent) database connection:

The "15 minute blog tutorial":http://manual.cakephp.org/chapter/18 is the best way to learn "how to bake". After trying it out yourself you'll be able to grasp all CakePHP's basic concepts and start coding your own application.