If you are in IT department you need to update yourself constantly. If you fail to do so you will not be able to survive and I think you will lose your job one day. Recently I started working on CakePhp to update myself and have some taste of it. As I've already worked in Zend Framework so things were not looking hard. However few things that irritated me was their directory structure and their conventions. In cake you need to stick to their conventions and it provide you single way to do most of the things contrary to the Zend which is more flexible and provide you serveral ways for doing the same thing.
Although cake provide you components for Acl, Authentication, Email etc and it is easier to work with these components, however I will prefer to work in Zend until and unless my client force me to switch to cake.
Cake has some stuff that i would appreciate,
1. simple Acl and authentication handling.
2. more mature form creating especially validation which enable you to customize everything.
3. Configuration is easy and you can easily define routing.
4. Cake uses prototype and scripaculuous for implementing Ajax. I think it uses some functions(cakephp) to work with ajax instead of writing javascript.
5. paging is quite easy to work with.
I think for beginners it is good place to start.
However Zend has more loosely defined structure and provide you serveral ways for doing the same thing. The component like Zend_Db is fabolous to work with. you can create select, update, insert and delete statement easily. After all In my view Cakephp cann't compete Zend.
