Of all the people in the CakePHP community that I have come across, none suffers from a lack of respect more than John David Anderson, more commonly known as _psychic_ on IRC. Why do I say this? John heads the CakePHP documentation project, a thankless task that seems only to exist so unimaginative people can complain that there is no documentation for CakePHP. If I had a dollar for every person on the CakePHP mailing list who seems to either not understand how to use Google or how to look at someone else's PHP code to figure out how something works, I could retire and blog full time.

But I digress. With a ton of help from Andy Dawson (AD7Six) the documentation for CakePHP 1.2 has moved forward immensely with the unveiling of the CakePHP Cookbook. It's a combination of manual and wiki, where people can flesh out the manual and make comments on the methods in there. I have been quite harsh on people who have called for a CakePHP wiki in the past, because they tend to be a mess. This project is just different enough that I cannot stop recommending people to use the cookbook when searching for answers to their CakePHP problems. In fact, if you can contribute by moving entries over from the temporary documentation to the cookbook, _psychic_ will have one less thing to do.

From now on, whenever I find a solution to something in CakePHP I will not only post it here on my blog (because, after all, I am still an egomaniac) I will also create an entry in the Cookbook if it's appropriate. Lucky for you, contributions are anonymous so you won't be able to tell what I've put in there. My first contribution has been to get my documentation on the Auth component in there (although my simple user registration stuff isn't in there), and Baz added his stuff he's been doing with Auth as well.

So, no more excuses about lack of documentation! Anyone who registers and account can create entries in the manual, and everyone who complains about on the mailing list will be told to go look at the cookbook and contribute changes and comments to it.