A central hub for cakePHP

Hi Robert, great question, but a tough one to answer, on one hand, a central place for all things cake is a great idea, and really everyone should be putting up their components, tutorials and the like directly there, however, on the other hand, as a freelance developer looking to establish a reputation and eventually some work from my blog, the sheer number of hours I currently put into my own site needs to pay off for me, if not financially, then with traffic building over a longer term to establish credibility, reputation and showcase my abilities, so yes, putting everything centrally would be great, but the work being done by everyone who creates components, helpers, tutorials, etc should also give a payoff to them also otherwise where is the incentive to invest so much time. But a great topic to raise and hopefully an interesting discussion will follow here, my own suggestion, so kind of aggregate feed at the bakery, where everything can be submitted but individual devellopers can benefit from the traffic they create?

I agree with you about the reputation part for your blog. That’s one of the reasons i write on my blog as well instead of something like the bakery.

I was thinking more like a central place that aggegrates all the content of the blogs about cakephp. Make it searchable and you have an incredibly focused way of getting information about cake. The main problem is that there must be a way to subscribe all the blogs to the system and it needs to be constantly updated. The google custom search i talked about isn’t updated for months (last in 2007) and there are a couple of very great new blogs that aren’t indexed. Same with he superfeed.

But i think this could be overcome, most of the blogs are very active so if a few people stepped up and managed the system it would work very well i think.

what i’d like to see is a few (well as many as possible) of the blog owners and bakery contributors in a chatroom discussing the possibilities.

It would be an incredible resource for beginning users and if all goes well, the participating blogs would get more traffic.

I think bakery’s moderators / team / admin can learn a lot from RoR project, see where they stand right now. RoR has a great wiki with all type of 3rd party stuff listed at same place in decent way. While the bakery is dominated by handful of people. I think every open source project and resources related to it should be kept open and contribution should be rewarding in some way to developers to encourage them post more. Most of my friends here in India, are great programmers and write some cool code which can help the community, but they laugh at the idea of posting it to bakery.

I ditto this comment. I’ve written some stuff in the past, but I’m by no means a CakePHP expert. So much of the stuff I write just “works”, so I leave it up on my blog and let people enjoy it that way.

I think the community is served well by having multiple resources. Having people posting to their blogs can help evangelize the framework by demonstrating how a specific problem can be solved. Google helps ensure that answers can always be found if people are looking for them. Basically, it’s win-win.

On the flip-side, getting something accepted within the Bakery can help increase your “street cred” by demonstrating your expertise within a sanctioned environment and can go a long ways to increasing your visibility beyond your own blog and to future (or current) employers/clients.

Basically, I don’t think it matters which way you go and both have definite benifits, to the person creating the content and to the people looking for the content.

@ Jonathan, I agree that the community is served by having multiple resources, it’s just that i think that some of those resources are hard to find. If i need a solution to a specific problem i use google and find the solution on a blog, in the bakery or in the groups, but i’m not always looking for the solution of a problem. Sometimes i want to see if there’s anything new or cool being done with the framework.

Shure, there’s the trac and most of the blogs have rss feeds, but there are so many resources that it becomes difficult to keep track of it all. Also blogs come and go, i have a number of blogs about cake in my feedreader that haven’t been updated for a long while now and i’m missing out on new content from other blogs that just haven’t stumbled on yet.

So while it’s very good to have multiple resources it would be great if there was a place where you can stay up to date on all of those resources and search articles for instance.