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 | Bake theme + setup commands + a small admin sidebar layout. | 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, loadModel(), etc. | When using PHPStorm. Always. |
| cakephp-icon | 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-fixture-factories — factory-pattern test fixtures.
- 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.