Anyhow, I wrote a blog post on the subject quite a while ago, which is pretty much a braindump of what I am attempting with CakePackages. I also wrote a post on what I thought The Chaw might have been had development on CakePHP not split.
I'm currently working on a smarter package classifier, one that uses the Reflection api, but unfortunately there are MANY bugs with my current approach. My current output (as of yesterday) is the following thus. I'd like to complete this before I continue working on CakePackages in the general sense.
Other things I'd like to do are default to showing an up to date readme, allow commenting/tagging/usage counters for given packages, supporting github organizations, as well as displaying forks on the site. I also have a non-working plugin installer (not the one on github) that I'm futzing with locally.
I also started working on integrating the ApiGenerator with CakePackages (for the purposes of classification) to provide documentation for each package, but there are so many bugs with each Package that it's almost useless at this point. I've thrown out that branch several times without anything working satisfactorily.
One other thing I'd like to explore is possibly pulling in outside information for a given package automatically. So like auto-collating blog posts, tweets, bit.ly links, bakery articles etc. about a plugin. A recommendation system built around this would be nice, ie. if a plugin does X, perhaps a user might want Y instead?
I am a full-time developer at a startup, as well as a full-time student, so you can imagine that my time is limited. Feel free to open up Wiki articles around your plans, or implement them and make pull requests. I'm more than happy to get feedback/contributions on this. It's not like I'm making any money off of CakePHP anyhow.
Jose Diaz-Gonzalez