PHP Frameworks

Posted: Fri Jul 23, 2010 9:14 am

I have been following a recent discussion at LinkedIn by the LinkedIn PHP Group after someone asked the inevitable question "Which is the best PHP framework to use".

The clear winner and overwhelming majority votes went to CodeIgniter with Zend trailing in second place with only a few votes.
After looking at both of these frameworks myself and merging the various comments from the Professional PHP Developers, I am inclined to agree with the general consensus that;

Quote:

For very large (probably business/corporate site) projects, then Zend is the preferred solution - for everything else, there is CodeIgniter

Interestingly, Symfony got a number of mentions but all of them were negative. Personally I dislike Symfony because I really don't see why any framework should need you to run a command line to 'build' your finished project and although I have not looked at Symfony in any great detail (other than a script which was using it) but I found it so convoluted, it was almost impossible to understand when it came to tracing back the MVC components.
In fairness to Symfony, if you are developing a bespoke application for a client and want to limit the chance that a third party will break it or change it, then it's probably the right framework to use.

Newbie Joined: Jan 13, 2006 Posts: 78

Can you point me to this discussion? Which other frameworks were considered? Were there evaluation factors / criteria discussed or was it more of a generic discussion?

Sorry for all the questions - this is an interesting topic.

Posted: Sun Aug 01, 2010 7:45 am

Original discussion here - a group discussion for the Group LinkedPHPers. There was a similar discussion a while ago in a different group but but I cannot find the link. If anyone else adds a comment to that discussion I will add the link here when I get the notification email.

The discussion was very subjective, with most people citing 'ease of use' and 'flexibility' as their main reason for voting for CodeIgniter. CakePHP also got a mention. Taking the results from both discussions, ZEND was actually the clear winner but was often couched with 'not for the beginner' or 'better suited to Enterprise solutions due to it's complexity and size' etc...

I am reading a book at the moment (PDF format) which contains a brief comparative overview of CodeIgniter, CakePHP and Symfony. A pity the author missed off Zend but I'll mail it to you any way in case you find it useful.

I am digressing now but...

I'm actually tinkering with a really simple CMS that has CodeIgniter at it's core at *edit* LINK DELETED as domain has expired
At 8mb, including many photo's I would say it's lightweight - yet so far, it has Groups functionality, is fully multi-lingual (content as well as literals), tags, title,description and meta data can be set for each 'item' and for each language, it's own theming system (template variable parsing) file uploads, AJAX lightbox-esque image vewing, automated thumbnail generation (it actually creates two additional images of any image uploaded based on size criteria you set) and the list goes on.

I have actually been looking for something 'simple' to allow me to create basic multi-lingual websites (welcome, about us, prices etc pages) that a none programmer can then access to edit and add content pages (tinyMCE editing) as they see fit so I'm combining that with an investigation into how easy it is for me, as an OOP novice and PHP Framework virgin to adapt something with CodeIgniter at it's core http://www.ionizecms.com/

Site Admin Joined: Jan 06, 2006 Posts: 308

Thank you for this as I have a very similar need to create very simple sites that my client can manage the content for. This might be the ticket. Looks simpler than MODx. I was going to start using Zend, but this would be much quicker.

Posted: Fri Aug 06, 2010 8:54 am

One thing that Ionize does not cater for is menu 'management'. Currently you can select whether or not a menu link appears for a specific content page but there is no facility to create additional menu's e.g. a left hand column menu.
The template can be modified to replicate the header menu items but after a discussion on their support forum, they have agree to create a menu management system for mid September.

Posted: Tue Aug 10, 2010 6:24 am

I will try and split the Ionize stuff off into a seperate topic at some point but wanted to add (since I dragged the OP off-topic lol) that I spent a day porting a static table-less HTML template into Ionize and it was not actually that difficult. Of course, as you would expect, I tackled it back to front> It would have been easier to dump the template into Ionize by seperating the various sections (header, content,footer) into Ionize 'pages' and then substitute my original hard coded text for the template data tags but I did it the hard way by modifying a duplicate of the original theme.
One thing I do really like is the way it handles on-the-fly hard coded literals.
If you need text which is not already in a language file, you simply write

Code:




ion:translation term="your_text_here" /

which will output your_text_here on the page but also dynamically adds the text to the language table so by then going to Content->Translation in the admin area, you can translate your text into any of the active languages.

Posted: Fri Sep 24, 2010 9:10 am

Here is an interesting link to a new website that compares PHP Frameworks (source LinkedIn)
http://www.phpframeworks.com/
Not completely sure of the accuracy as they have CodeIgniter down for 'no user authentication' module and I'm pretty sure it does have one.
Like wise they have Zend down as 'no templates' but I'm pretty sure Zend has support for Smarty.
An interesting comparison site though none the less and I think I'll be checking out some of the others, like Prado.

Newbie Joined: Jan 13, 2006 Posts: 78

Have you seen the Yii Framework? I saw a demo of an app prototyped with Yii today, and it was good.

Posted: Fri Jan 07, 2011 9:52 am

I had heard of it but never looked at it. Time to take it for a spin I guess Smile

Site Admin Joined: Jan 06, 2006 Posts: 308

Funny. I was looking at it as well. Just never got far enough to try it out yet. I've been contemplating for many years to create my own "tegonuke" framework to help speed up my module development, but who has time to re-invent the wheel.

Zend, in my opinion, isn't too shared host friendly with its requirement to be included in the PHP path. CodeIgniter is quite flexible in this regards and I was giving it serious consideration, but updates to the framework are just too few and far between for my liking, plus it doesn't have the vast following (i.e., developers creating new stuff), but its still high on my list having created a dynamic web site with it in relatively short order.

Then I heard about Yii, also through LinkedIn, and started to investigate. Isn't as straightforward to learn, but I didn't get very far into it and haven't had the time to pick it back up since.

Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2011 2:38 am

I just decided to take Yii out for a spin!
I'm not going to make any comments on it's flexibility or anything because I simply have not got that far with it yet.

I downloaded the package and installed it on my DEV box and have been following an excellent tutorial at
http://www.larryullman.com/2009/06/18/introduction-to-the-yii-framework/#more-473

Installation was naturally really simple, though I'm suprised that, like Symfony you need to kick things off using a command line tool but for those using Ubuntu, thats easy enough;
cd into the framework directory and then type

Code:

php yiic webapp path/to/webroot

In my case I wanted the application folder in the same path as the framework directory to path/to/webroot is actually ../app

The thing that has me really excited so far is the fact that once you manually create your tables for your application, Yii has a web accessible tool you can use to create your controllers, views and CRUD files automatically for you. If you are writing a small application from scratch, it might not seem very time saving but if you were writing a largisg app or possibly converting an existing application which might have many tables, this feature alone could save you days of development work.

More later.....