Admittedly, I used it a long time ago. Back then, it was obviously never really used by any of its developers for things beyond the trivial "Blog Tutorial". For example, you couldn't reasonably put model-related code in your model classes, because the model data (coming in from the ORM as nested associative arrays) were structured subtly different depending on how it came in (i.e. on which ModelPeer the query originated). This effectively forced you to make fat controllers and useless models.
Additionally, I know of no framework that reinvented more wheels than CakePHP.
Its legacy (who wants to still support PHP4?). AFAIK, it's no longer maintained; I believe all the core development is now taking place on the Lithium project: http://lithify.me/
None of these things are true, I don't know where anyone comes up with this stuff. Sounds like a smear job more than anything. CakePHP2 is PHP 5.2.8+[1]. It's still being maintained and 2.2 was released this week[2]. Lithium is not a real 'fork' from Cake - rather it is a project that two of the Cake devs were working on as a 'next gen CakePHP' but decided to make into a separate project - the two frameworks don't share any code in their 'production' releases. Lithium has a much smaller community and is still poorly documented (as far as I can tell having tried to use it for a project).
The Lithium folks (nate & gwoo in particular) split off from the Cake core team. There was some contention but generally speaking I think everyone is still friends. As for lithium being the successor to cake 1.3... well certainly nate & gwoo feel that way, that's why they built it. :) And certainly phpnut & mark_story don't feel that way, that's why they are still driving forward with cake 2.0. Anyway they are both cool projects but I was reacting strongly to your assertion that cake is "no longer maintained", which is as accurate as saying RoR is no longer maintained and has been officially superseded by Node+Express.
