Thanks to the power of Twitter I found out that The Show for CakePHP was resuscitated and brought back to life last night. I listened to the (surprisingly short) show, the main thrust of which was that CakePHP 1.2RC3 was released last night. Why should you care?

• Final RC before a final 1.2 release
• Significant speed increases in the wake of Rasmus Lerdorf's talk about PHP framework performace, and Cake's poor showing.
• A chance to totally break your application by upgrading!

Well, maybe not so much on the last item but it's ALWAYS good to see any project make a significant release. 1.2 has been in the works for more than 18 months, which seems to many to be way too long. I'm not so sure I share that sentiment. If the goal is to try and produce quality releases, then "it's done when it's done" is a reasonable answer. I'm sure this is not a new argument, so I won't get into it here.

My own contributions to RC3 have been, what's the word...non-existent. Non-computer hobbies + side work = no time to contribute to Cake. I found out that commit access for people who haven't contributed anything in more than 60 days has been revoked, but that's really just a minor annoyance. I'm sure I could get it back by asking nicely and actually having something to contribute.

But I think I've gotten back into Cake developing at the right time as I caved in and decided that my long-rumoured plan-a-road-trip site shall be built in CakePHP after all. Yes, I've been playing around with Django but I'm violating one of my favourite rules: Just Build It, Damnit! I've been fooling around with Balsamiq Mockups to do the pages and are now digging around for helpers to do the mapping mashup I need. If you want to mock me over how little progress I've made, feel free to visit the site. If you'd like to get involved at all (I could use some help on the "make a pretty UI for it" front) let me know.