Looking for Som Best Practices for Structuring Models in CakePHP 4?

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Hi everyone,

I have been working on a project using CakePHP 4 and I want to ensure I am structuring my models efficiently for long term maintainability. I understand the basics of creating tables, entities and associations but I would love to hear your insights or recommendations.

How do you typically structure your models when dealing with complex relationships: ??
Are there specific naming conventions or folder structures you find helpful to keep things organized: ??
Do you use behaviors extensively or do you prefer custom methods in Table classes for shared logic: ??

Also, if there are any common pitfalls or “gotchas” that I should watch out for when scaling a project in CakePHP,… I would really appreciate it if you could share them !!

I have also gone through this thread https://discourse.cakephp.org/t/help-on-fat-model-design-for-cakephp-4-datasphere but still looking forward to learning from the community here. Thanks in advance !!

With REgards,
Daniel Jose

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I’d recommend you structure your code into “private plugins” which all live inside your plugins directory.

Each plugin is sort of your own mini-app which contains all the models, controllers, templates, tests etc. for that specific usecase.

On the topic of naming conventions: As long as you follow the CakePHP Naming Conventions you will be fine with all the code that gets auto generated and cakephp’s expectations of how things fit together.

The rest is basically up 2 you how you want to name stuff so it fits your needs and expectations.