hmmmm..... /etc/zm/core.php - that doesn't look like its in the right place. Unless someone has made a change I am not aware of, there should only be *.conf files there.
In order for ZoneMinder to work with the version of cakephp we have currently, certain files had to be modified by us. If I recall, all these files live here:
https://github.com/ZoneMinder/zoneminde ... app/Config
So for anyone who is attempting to upgrade the version of cakephp on their system, the first thing that comes to mind is whether you took the zoneminder specific information out of those files and properly blended them into the new files. It is entirely possible that certain variable names have changed too.
Our cakephp folder also has several .htaccess files hidden in several places. You need to make sure those are still there, and in the right spot. On a side note, I have gotten rid of these sneaky files for redhat builds and have chosen to centralize this into the master apache config file. Look here:
https://github.com/ZoneMinder/zoneminde ... onf.in#L47
The folder names in each apache directive tell you where to look for the .htaccess files. If this turns out to be the issue, perhaps this would be a good time to centralize these for debian builds too.
If you have already done these steps, then the next thing we need is data. I don't know what you mean when you say "no api". What do you see when you manually type in an api url into your browser? Blank screen? http 404? Also, there is a cake error log. Have you looked at that? The location of the errorlog is one of the things we modified. Depending on the state of you system at the moment, the cake errorlog might be under /var/log/zoneminder. in zoneminder's temp folder, or the cakephp tmp folder. If the commands are indeed getting to cakephp, then it is most certainly writing error messages to that file.