Which PHP Framework to choose

CakePHP, Symphony or Zend

[seabird505]

Hi

I have been coding in PHP for quite some time now and am pretty comfortable with DB and application logic. However, I don't like presentation stuff that much, which often takes most of the time of my freelance projects. Hence, now for the ist time I am eyeing on PHP Frameworks for rapid application development. BTW, I have been developing in Dreamweaver up till now.

I have heard good opinions on CakePHP. However, people also praise and advocate Symphony and Zend and many more.

Which framework should I choose that
1. requires smooth learning curve.
2. provides good documentation.
3. is not an over-kill for a small to medium scale / freelance projects.
4. provides flexibility in subsequent site maintenance
5. provides flexibility in framework patch/version upgrades
6. is fast in execution (not very resource intensive)

Thanks for your time.

[enigma1]

Is your intention to do development or deployment? For development you need to look around a lot perhaps you will find pros and cons for every framework and the situation is dynamic, things change quickly.

Now if it's for deployment you should be looking for applications rather than frameworks. Typically popular applications for carts, blogs, forums, etc., may use an existing framework heavily moded or some custom one. But in this case you should focus your resources learning the application internals and see if the application has the items you mentioned.