Is CakePHP really the best PHP framework?  After a lot of research, testing, head scratching, and 18 months of developing with CakePHP I have no regrets choosing CakePHP over Symfony and the other frameworks.

After looking at Symfony, Zend, Ruby on Rails, and a number of other web development frameworks I chose CakePHP becasue it seemed to offer enough of what we wanted from a framework without becoming a way of life.  CakePHP provides the structure and convention needed to make the development process more efficient without forcing you to buy 7 O'Reilly books and stay up until 3am every night for 2 months learning the "way". 

CakePHP's ability to perform under pressure has been great.  One of our recently released applications has been serving about 500,000 page views per day.  At peak loads the application has processed more than 100 e-commerce transactions per minute.   No sweat!

On another project we needed a form in an AJAX light box.  No problem!  A couple lines of code and viola!  Slick, fast, and easy to implement.

I'm still not certain CakePHP is the best PHP framework.  Our experience with it has been great, giving us all the benefits you're supposed to get from an MVC framework.

Update:

First Impressions on CakePHP - making the jump from Ruby on Rails to CakePHP