A few weeks ago I came across Wildflower, which, in the simplest terms, is a CMS built with CakePHP.

However, Wildflower is not the application, it’s a layer that sits between your application (e-commerce, job board, whatever) and Cake. It’s set up in such a way that it handles requests for its own controllers, but lets all other requests through to your App.

This is a very interesting way of making a CMS and keeping it extensible. It’s compatible with all plugins, helpers, components and behaviours that you can use with any Cake site. That means that developers don’t need to learn yet another plugin architecture to add their own functionality (as long as they’re already comfortable with Cake, of course.)