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About Scaffolding in CakePhp . Application scaffolding is a technique that allows a developer to define and create a basic application that can create, retrieve, update and delete objects. Scaffolding in CakePHP also allows developers to define how objects are related to each other, and to create and break those links.

All that’s needed to create a scaffold is a model and its controller. Once you set the $scaffold variable in the controller, you’re up and running.

CakePHP’s scaffolding is pretty cool. It allows you to get a basic CRUD application up and going in minutes. So cool that you’ll want to use it in production apps. Now, we think its cool too, but please realize that scaffolding is… well… just scaffolding. It’s a loose structure you throw up real quick during the beginning of a project in order to get started. It isn’t meant to be completely flexible, it’s meant as a temporary way to get up and going. If you find yourself really wanting to customize your logic and your views, its time to pull your scaffolding down in order to write some code. CakePHP’s Bake console, covered in the next section, is a great next step: it generates all the code that would produce the same result as the most current scaffold.

Scaffolding is a great way of getting the early parts of developing a web application started. Early database schemas are subject to change, which is perfectly normal in the early part of the design process. This has a downside: a web developer hates creating forms that never will see real use. To reduce the strain on the developer, scaffolding has been included in CakePHP. Scaffolding analyzes your database tables and creates standard lists with add, delete and edit buttons, standard forms for editing and standard views for inspecting a single item in the database.

To add scaffolding to your application, in the controller, add the $scaffold variable:

class CategoriesController extends AppController {

var $scaffold;

}

for more info : http://manual.cakephp.org/view/105/Scaffolding