OK, I am currently looking into some frameworks for PHP and would like some opinions from people who have used them on a professional level.
Some points:
It must be a framework - PHP is bad enough as it is and I really don’t want to use it, but this is a business decision not personal, the framework will add some kind of structure to the code and allow us to easily exploit MVC pattern, it must also have some kind of test suite built in as TDD is a must not an option.
Also frameworks are generally very well maintained.
It must be PHP, partly because I know PHP and because of the following:-
PERL - We don’t have the expertise in house to handle it.
.NET - Over kill for the type of site that will be produced/managed.
RUBY - I am a ruby programmer at my day job, I make lovely Rails applications for specialist tasks and use Ruby for all types of CGI and scripting goodness, I would love to use Rails for this area of the business, but it’s just too bloody time intensive, specialized - think £25 an hr PHP programmer vs a £50 an hr Ruby programmer, and (relatively speaking) expensive to deploy for mass produced CMS driven sites.
PYTHON - Django is very very nice to play with, but I personally don’t have the knowledge in Python or the time to learn it and lead a team to use it on a professional day to day basis.
So I have narrowed it down to the following PHP frameworks…
http://www.symfony-project.com/
http://codeigniter.com/
So far (IMO) Code Igniter from what I can grasp from the API and DOCS is miles ahead of the other 2, but I can’t say that from experience.
Has anyone got any opinions on this, or anything I haven’t considered, all opinions are welcome, please just don’t turn this into a debate or rant 
RB
