I'm writing this quick note for anyone else that might come across this problem. I recently decided to upgrade one of my CentOS servers running a cleint's CakePHP application from a PHP 5.2.X version up to PHP 5.3.1. The package was from the remi repository, with no modifications. Suddenly, Cake stopped using my controllers' actions to generate output, and was displaying output from the default controller.
After pulling my head out, I found the issue in the dispatcher. Around line 359 or so (I hacked up my dispatcher with additional comments while debugging) in cake/Dispatcher.php, you will find the following:
$output = call_user_func_array(array(&$controller, $params['action']), empty($params['pass'])? null: $params['pass']);
The problem is, call_user_func_array requires the 2nd parameter to be an array. As you can see, cake is passing 'null' if we have no additional parameters to pass to the controller action. To fix, just change 'null' to 'array()':
$output = call_user_func_array(array(&$controller, $params['action']), empty($params['pass'])? array(): $params['pass']);
Now everything should be working again.
Note that this particular application is using a very early version of Cake 1.2. This problem might be fixed in later versions.
