Which PHP Framework for a large site?

[PaulM]

Hi,

I'm about to start a pretty big site, it's just for a personal project though, so because I can only do it in my free time I don't want it to take forever to build. I'm hoping a framework will help me so I don't waste time writing bits that I can use from an already stable framework.

I'm comfortable with PHP (although I've been using ASP.NET more recently) but I've never used a framework, nor the MVC pattern they all seem to follow.

Could somebody recommend a good framework for a beginner, but also one that isn't going to limit me too much. Today I've looked at quite a few but I'm torn between Kohana, symfony and CakePHP although I'm open to any others too.

Any suggestions would be appreciated, thanks in advance.

 

[PaulM]

Thanks for the replies, I think I'll spend a while testing Zend, Kohana & Symfony separately before starting the project to see which I prefer then (if there isn't a 'best' one), I tried CakePHP and didn't really like it.

I was avoiding CodeIgniter because I wanted one that fully utilised the (almost) proper OOP in PHP5. I believe Kohana started as a fork of CodeIgniter anyway so they should be similar.

Thanks again.

 

[PaulM]

Extra question!

Are any of these frameworks likely to have less bugs than others? I tried Kohana for a few hours today, first framework I'd tried, I was loving it, it seemed very nice and easy to use... but then hit an annoying bug in a rather important place. (sql query builder).

I stepped through the code for a bit to find the error in the database class, I sort of fixed it by changing a bit in one of their classes, but because the methods don't have many comments I'm not sure if what I changed may break something somewhere else. A little off-putting because I was wanting something to speed up my development time and avoid my own bugs, but I ended up debugging the framework .

Oh well, I guess bugs happen, and I'll try Kohana when they release the next version, but now I'm off to try a different one.