Planet CakePHP

I would make a horrible framework developer.  Why?  Because I don’t have the patience to put the effort into making my code backwards compatible (unless I really, really have to).  Thankfully, the developers of CakePHP are not like me.
I just had cause to take an old client site that was built on CakePHP 1.0.x and move it over to a new platform with some upgrades in functionality.  Since we are most likely going to be developing a bunch of new features on the site I felt it was important to go ahead and upgrade the cake core libraries to the recently-released 1.2 — a task I was dreading from the moment I thought it.
But, surprise surprise, the whole ordeal wasn’t an ordeal at all.  In fact was incredibly easy because the Cake devs made it a point to include backwards compatibility. As a result a lot of my legacy code could remain in place to be upgraded gradually.
Take for instance the following gem.  I was a rough and tumble Cake developer back when I first wrote this and this format was actually never really acceptable in the first place, but it worked in 1.0.x:

$this->Order_frame->findAll();
// correct way to access the order_frames table: $this->OrderFrame->findAll();

// in view
echo $orderFrames['Order_frame']['type'];
// correct way to access the data: $orderFrames['OrderFrame']['type'];

Now, having used Cake for a couple of years I know the error of my ways. But, to my surprise, when I ran this legacy code locally on a fresh 1.2 core it worked. Huh? There was no way they would still support this ancient syntax! Heck, I dont think they ever supported it, really.
Anyways, this is a long way of showing my appreciation to the CakePHP devs for building the framework with all the legacy code out there in mind.