Best PHP Framework for corporate website

[mattmerrill]

Hey Everyone -

I know this topic probably is brought up a lot, but it appears from searching that it's been a few months, and I know things change rapidly in this arena.

My company will be doing a major refactoring of the website in the near future, and I'm trying to convince them to get away from open source CMS systems and move towards a PHP framework that will allow us flexibility and scalability.

Our criteria are:
Speed of development, stability, future of the framework (whether or not it will be around in a year, backwards compatibility, etc), site performance (no major bottlenecks), etc.

I've done a lot of reading and I think I've narrowed it down to a few frameworks which are:
CakePHP (concerned about performance), Zend (concerned about speed of development), Symfony (concerned about future of project), and possibly Codeigniter (haven't heard as much about this one...)

Any information or feedback would be greatly appreciated! Thanks everyone.

[jatar_k]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld mattmerrill,

though don't use a framework myself from what I have been hearing I would go with CakePHP or Zend, your concerns listed are the same I see but either of those would be fine. I would probably lean towards Zend but mostly for their having been involved with PHP for much longer.

[mattmerrill]

thanks for the reply jatar.

I'm leaning towards Cake right now over all the others. Does anyone know of any reasons against using Cake?

[henry0]

mattmerril, I suppose that indeed you have a good php/mysql understanding and that you are fully aware that none out of the box are "push button easy" they all need to devote quite some learning time before putting the pedal down to the metal.

You also need to check out the level of support;
register in your two possible frame work candidate support forums.
Perform a few searches, make believe you have it and did hit a snag then see what will come out of your experimentation.

Good luck :)

[mattmerrill]

thanks for the reply henry -

I am fairly seasoned with php/mysql - and am totally willing to put the time in to learn any framework. That's actually why this question is here though, I don't want to waste mine (and the companies) time learning and implementing a framework that is going to be a 'dead-end' solution.

I think your suggestion for checking out the level of support is a good one, thanks.

Have you used any of the above frameworks by chance?

[henry0]

Not per se
I use a simple tpl system that does fine
and before I used my own OOP tpl system
However I had for a while an in depth look at the Zend one, and totally second jatar_k, if a framework was to be my choice, then I'll use the Zend
Sorry cannot be of further help.

[mattmerrill]

No worries - I appreciate any feedback!

[WesleyC]

I've used CodeIgniter fairly extensively in the past, and had a good deal of success with it. Its structure is fairly clear and concise, the user guide is excellent, and it seems to be well-supported, both by the developers and community. There are a few things I change via libraries as soon as I install it (using a database session handler instead of the default, for instance), but other than these quirks it's very solid and fast. The average CI-caused overhead on any given page load seems to be about .001 ms.

[mattmerrill]

Thanks Wesley - I'll check codeigniter out as well

[mattmerrill]

does anyone else have any opinions on the topic? Anyone used any of the frameworks?