Hire CakePHP developers to extend, support and upgrade your applications.

There is no single rate for CakePHP developers. Cost depends on the seniority you need, the engagement model you choose (adding developers to your team, a dedicated team, or a fixed-price project), how long the engagement runs and the scope of the work. For CakePHP work, the biggest drivers are the starting version, especially CakePHP 2 with its pre-ORM models, the number of custom plugins and behaviors, how far the code departs from framework conventions, and whether PHP itself must be upgraded too. Share your requirements and we will come back with a quote for your situation.

You tell us the technology, seniority, role and team structure you need. We recommend CakePHP developer profiles that match those requirements, and you review the profiles and speak with the engineers yourself before anyone joins your team. When you interview, the areas worth testing are cakePHP naming conventions and how they shape models, controllers and templates; the CakePHP ORM: Table classes, entities, associations and finders; writing custom behaviors, components and plugins; replacing AuthComponent with the Authentication and Authorization plugins; using the upgrade tool and Rector across major versions; and fixture-based testing with PHPUnit in CakePHP.

It depends on which engineers with the right skills are available when you get in touch, so we do not publish a fixed start date. Availability is part of the conversation when we recommend profiles, and the start date is agreed with you before the engagement begins.

Because you interview the engineers before anyone joins, fit is tested before work starts. If concerns come up once the engagement is running, raise them with us directly. How changes to the team are handled is set out in the terms you agree with us at the start.

A freelancer suits small, well-defined tasks you can manage yourself. A dedicated developer joins your team under your direction. A dedicated team adds several roles around your product, and a project-based team delivers a defined outcome end to end.

They work in your time zone or with a meaningful overlap agreed up front, and inside your own tools and process: Slack or Teams, Jira, GitHub or GitLab, your standups, sprint planning and code review.

Upgrading keeps the business logic and conventions your application already has, and is usually done in stages with tests around critical paths. A rebuild in a framework such as Laravel or Symfony can be the cheaper route for very large or heavily customized applications. We assess the codebase first and tell you honestly which route makes more sense.

Yes. The official cakephp/upgrade tool uses Rector rules to rename classes, update method signatures and adjust namespaces between major versions. It handles much of the mechanical work, but custom behaviors, plugins and templates still need manual review and testing.

The CakePHP Migrations plugin, built on Phinx, versions every schema change as code, so each environment can be migrated or rolled back consistently. Seed files populate reference data, and migrations can be baked from an existing database when an older application never used them.

Behaviors package reusable model logic that attaches to Table classes, such as Timestamp for created and modified fields, Tree for hierarchical data or Translate for multilingual content. Custom behaviors keep shared rules out of individual tables and controllers.

CakePHP 5 requires PHP 8.1 or newer and makes wide use of strict types and native type declarations. Applications on older PHP versions need a PHP upgrade as part of the move, which is usually worth planning alongside the framework upgrade.