Which PHP Framework for a large site?

PaulM

PaulM

PaulM

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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.
 
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As you said, Smarty is a templating system, not a framework. I don't know much about Symfony, but as for Kohana and CakePHP, it depends how much code you want to write, and how much control you want over what you do write.

Kohana is much more lightweight than CakePHP, and as such you'll end up writing more code, but you'll have far more control over what's happening. CakePHP on the other hand does a lot for you (via generators, etc.) but tends to restrict you to using its own conventions and patterns. It's basically a Rails clone for PHP and has a lot of 'automagic' features.

I personally prefer Kohana for the versatility and extra control it grants.
 
Hi. What about the Zend Framework (http://framework.zend.com).

We use it for pretty much everything at work (Web Development agency) and it seems to work pretty well.

Its worth considering. My boss doesn't take these decisions lightly and will have taken some time to compare and judge all the different ones out there.

Good luck with your project, whatever it may be, and with whatever framework you decide to use.
 
I have been playing about with Kohana also and it seems very good so far although I haven't done anything too exciting with it. I still think Inquisitor gets paid for every time he mentions Kohana! :)
 
I'm currently working with Zend and it seems pretty good. I have a feeling that the setup stage takes longer than other frameworks but it does offer you a lot of powerful features. I'm using it with Smarty to generate the templates for all of the views.
 
Zend or Symfony. Personally I choose Symfony for it's admin generator.

It's a long learning curve but most of the answers are a (often extensive) Google away. Go through a good few days of the Jobeet tutorial, browse Trac/SVN and ask at their forums when you need advice :cool:

I also have a thing against frameworks that are "PHP4 compatible" - I won't try and justify it because it's one of those things where if you disagree, you disagree. I guess it just makes me feel like I'm working within a framework that's already outdated.

Final note; you won't be able to just jump in with a framework. It does, unfortunately, take more than a single evening to get properly comfortable with one :(
 
We've been using Codeingiter for everything for the past 18 months. I like it personally - certainly easy to get to grips with and speeds up development no end.
 
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.
 
Extra question! :p

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.
 
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