Why CakePHP?

A friend of mine, @harryharrold tweeted a very valid question to me the other day:

Out of interest: why not use Drupal? Too heavy? Or did you want to learn more CakePHP? Cos it looks like a view to me? (Doesn't everything?)

This is one of those times where 140 characters is not enough space to do the answer justice, so here's my >140 answer:

1. Yes, Drupal IS heavy. That said, you get a lot of bang for your buck. Out of the box Drupal doesn't provide all the functionality I'd need for LRPevents.com. At a bare minimum I'd need to install what I consider the Drupal Survival Pack: Views, CCK, PathAuto, an Administrator Theme and a few other must have modules.
   
   LRPevents has been a back burner project for a long time. I've swapped technologies in and out over the years as I tried out various ideas. At one point I even built a quick Drupal site to see how/if it would hang together. It did, but I never felt fully in control of either the code or the workflow.
   
   LRPevents.com is not a CMS. It's a front end to a relational database. All the extra code in Drupal for managing a CMS would be wasted and I'd have to write a fair bit of code to get the bits working that Drupal (or its many, many modules) don't provide.
   
   Drupal is a fantastic piece of work, and version 7 looks to be building into an awesome piece of software. But in this case, it simply wasn't the right tool for the job.
2. I like CakePHP :-) It's my tool of choice in my real job (we use Drupal too!). I've been using it for a few years now and have gathered together a good toolkit of code and techniques to get things done. Also, I've maned to migrate parts of LRPevents.com into work projects.
3. CakePHP is easy to expand and incorporate 3rd party plugins. See my other post on getting Twitter Integration up and running in less than 10 minutes.
4. I like to code! I wouldn't be doing this job if I didn't! A lot of Drupal project work involves setting configuration options, using a gui to build views and tweaking templates. Also, it can be a bit of a bugger to work out what's going on when things go wrong. With Cake you are never too far away from the root of the problem.
5. The code behind LRPevents.com is relatively simple. Parts are taxing enough to be fun but not difficult enough to have the fun knocked out of it.
6. Drupal roles and rights aren't flexible enough. The system I have planned for LRPevents.com is very specific and would need me to write custom code in Drupal. I might as well be writing that custom code in a framework I'm more familiar with.

Please note: This is not a Drupal bashing excersise. Drupal is awesome and I'd remcommend it to anyone who needs a feature rich PHP/MySQL CMS. Heck, my blog runs on it and took all of 15 minutes to set up. In the case of my blog Drupal was the right tool for the job.