We are a small group of volunteer developers contributing to the framework for free in our spare time, there’s only so much we can do.
This has to change, the “there’s only so much we can do” part.
Following things need to happen:
- Rewrite the entire documentation to allow faster learning/implementation (remember, 90% of the fresh audience of CakePHP would leave the framework if the documentation is either too less, too tricky, too detailed and, in case of CakePHP, too much “advanced-focused” - compare with “setup and basic-setup” with Laravel)
- Community leaders (like yourself, Mark Story and other awesome people out there) have to take the ownership of owning CakePHP (count me in)
- Go to youtube and search for “CakePHP tutorials” and then “Laravel tutorials” (the single reason why almost cent percent of new developers are choosing to go the Laravel way).
- Official (as in as a separate GitHub repo under the “cakephp” org.) support of some of the modern UI frameworks (Vue.js included) : clearly understanding that this has scope of change in a few years, but then, if we do not support these constantly-evolving frameworks now, even CakePHP has a scope of eventually be "“most-popular-framework-of-a-time” that down the line 5-7 years people “might not even heard of it” (Vue.js would be a good starting point, or rather “Alpine.js”)
- Official support of some kind of CSS/front-end framework (I am thinking Tailwindcss), considering the Author is a major contributor to Laravel, so supporting Tailwindcss (officially and/or, by default) would encourage a lot of people (new and old both) to see CakePHP as a viable option (see - “community-focused” and “open” have entirely different meanings when “frameworks” support common technologies - easier transition, less-steep learning curve, very-open culture of development etc)