I have been working with cakephp for over an year now and I love working with it. Here are some of the best things I find about it.

1. Convention: although it's not mandatory to use it, I can't find a reason not to use it. Things that looked so stupid a year ago is a must have in every framework I am introduced to these days. It makes your life so easy.

2. Simple setup: I have setup dynamic websites with admin panels in a night using this baby. All thanks to it's crud scaffolding and templates.

3. Routing: even though this is used by many, it feels so good that you get friendly URLs everytime.

4. Power of PHP: PHP is a very powerful language. Sure there are lots of new ones in the market, but to have such a big community and speedy results to any queries on Google is a God sent. P.S. am not against JS frameworks. I just don't feel the need to use it yet.

5. Debugging: oh the log files always save you.

6. ORM: another awesome way to help you while running multiple queries at once.

7. Plugins: lots of wonderful snippets. Even some of the biggest companies provide cakephp sdks of their products.

I am yet to feel the power of PHP 7 which boasts of being atleast 2x faster than the older version. Fingers crossed.

Please correct me if I am wrong