CakePHP is a rapid development PHP framework that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications. Using commonly known design patterns like MVC and ORM within the convention over configuration paradigm, CakePHP reduces development costs and helps developers write less code.

Features of CakePHP:
- Model, View, Controller Architecture
- Application Scaffolding
- Code generation via Bake
- Helpers for HTML, Forms, Pagination, AJAX, Javascript, XML, RSS and more
- Access Control Lists and Authentication
- Simple yet extensive validation of model data
- Router for mapping urls and handling extensions
- Security, Session, and RequestHandler Components
- Utility classes for working with Files, Folders, Arrays and more

What's New in This Version:
- CakePHP 1.2.12, 1.3.16, 2.2.8 and 2.3.4 have just been released to fix a critical issue with how pagination & PaginatorComponent handle sort criteria.