New to Cake PHP - understanding best practices

Question

I have been asked to help a company untangle a mess which revolves around a distributed team and a Cake webapp. I have two main questions which no doubt display my ignorance with Cake.

• It has been noted that roughly 20% of the code has departed from the Cake framework. To me this sounds like potentially a significant issue. Is this common place or bad development practice?
• They are running version 1.3.14 which is quite old. Again is it normal to remain running an older version or is this bad practice?

Those two questions obviously have a lot of potential caveats but I'm hoping to get basic idea of what's considered good practice here.

Thank you.

Answer 1

• Is it possible for you to migrate the code that has departed? For maintainability's and scalability's sake, it is wise to try to keep everything within the same framework if you can. Unless you are, of course, using any external web services or the like.

• It is wise to try to keep things as updated as possible with their stable versions. Newer versions of frameworks normally bring performance improvements and tools aided to speed your development process, as well as can issue serious potential security issues. Then again, you also need to evaluate how big your app is and how many resources (Time, devs) it will take you to do this. But it is a wise practice to do so, and if you make the discipline to upgrade every major version then this development cycle should be less costly.