I'm certainly not the only person who has been blogging about this, but I thought I'd mention that a feature freeze is coming up for the next CakePHP 1.2 release, codenamed 'DV'. My very modest contribution this time around is a patch to fix a problem with running 'cake bake' on Windows, where it was mangling the app path that a user would enter. Ticket 4495 if anyone is interested.

Anyhow, anyone who uses CakePHP or wants to help out can definitely get involved in the process by:

• Entering bugs into CakePHP's trac if they don't see them in there
• Contributing tests and/or patches for existing bugs
• Testing out the bleeding-edge versions of CakePHP that you can get from the SVN repository

There has been a lot of debate on the mailing list about both the direction of the project and the attitude of people on the mailing list. Well, as one of the people who gets to be involved in both sides (albeit a minor role in terms of contributing code) I can tell you that the project will continue moving forward, building on all the traction CakePHP has gotten. Maybe 1.2 has dragged on for a while, but isn't that just a number anyway? Would people be reacting if it was Cake 1.7.2 or something like that?

What people don't always see is the amount of work that goes into CakePHP by developers. Every morning when I log into my account on my MacBook, I update my copy of CakePHP from SVN. 99.999% of the time there is an update. These days, tests are being written like crazy and Tim's awesome work in creating code coverage information and those things can only help the project as a whole get better. These are exciting times for anyone connected to the project, no doubt about that. No amount of CakePHP haters (you know who you are) are going to change that.

Secondly, people have to understand that a mailing list full of a lot of technical, highly-skilled people is not a friendly place for beginners. Sad, but true. I have answered many questions on the mailing list, some of them properly and some of them, well, let's just say my nickname of GrumpyCanuck has been well-placed. Can we all be civil? Probably not. Should we be civil? Maybe. I think anyone who doesn't understand the dynamics of the CakePHP list itself should go and read this. Forewarned is forearmed.