I launched the site last list night, probably around midnight or so. I’ll admit it’s pretty bland, but once we get some posts in there it should look better. Design is probably my biggest weakness at this point. I would describe my design style as functional. For my “real” job I take mockups of well designed sites and make them work all the time. Being able to come up with the design myself is something I’m going to have to work on.

I’m pretty impressed with CakePHP as a whole. I’d worked with a lot of CMS systems lately and I prefer the freedom a framework like Cake allows. There were a few quirks that I encounter, such as with the HTMLHelper method yearOptionTag. The method is supposed to simplify the creation of a year select for a form. But I found it unuseable because it forced “_year” onto the field name. It also didn’t allow you to set the year as descending.