Plugin Ecosystem
Tools sits at the center of a small family of CakePHP plugins by the same maintainer. Each one has a specific job: Tools pulls in the few it depends on, and the others are opt-in.
What Tools depends on (auto-installed)
| Plugin | Why Tools needs it |
|---|---|
| cakephp-shim | 4.x → 5.x BC shims (validation, model property style, etc.). Letting you migrate apps gradually instead of rewriting. |
Frequently paired with Tools
These are not dependencies, but they're commonly installed alongside Tools because they extend the same areas.
| Plugin | What it adds | When to add it |
|---|---|---|
| cakephp-setup | Setup commands and optional development and maintenance tooling. | When you want a head start on baking and an opinionated admin shell. |
| cakephp-ide-helper | PHPStorm meta files for CakePHP: autocomplete on association calls, fetchTable(), etc. | When editor completion or generated annotations are needed. |
| cakephp-templating | Icon helper (Font Awesome / Bootstrap / custom collections). | The dedicated replacement for the deprecated Tools\View\Helper\IconHelper. |
Other plugins from the same author
Worth knowing about, even if Tools doesn't depend on them.
- cakephp-queue: background jobs.
- cakephp-tinyauth: INI-based ACL.
- cakephp-geo: Geocoder behavior, GoogleMapsV3 helper.
- cakephp-dto: generated DTO classes from XML.
- cakephp-templating: extra template helpers and view utilities.
Browse the full list at https://github.com/dereuromark?tab=repositories&q=cakephp.
For factory-based test fixtures, see the separately maintained Fixture Factories plugin.