Fastest / Easiest method to develop a multi-user gaming engine in PHP/MySQL?

Question

Hi, I'm an advanced designer, but also starting out a career in development: I'm a PHP intermediate user. I (unfortunately) learnt procedural development, and not OOP.

My current project is a multi-user game web-app and I was developing procedurally only for my Boss to insist that it has to be OOP, so I needed to start learning OOP (I believe I am a relatively fast learner). A friend advised me to just learn a lightweight PHP framework and move on from there, since the project must be launched in less than three weeks (I have roughly 2 weeks left now)!

After viewing a lot of articles comparing them, I ended up with CodeIgniter, Kohana, and Yii based on the efficiency and the lightweight-edness. I am not quite used to command-line instructions like it's done in Yii, so I had to drop it off to save my time :(. Kohana looks very interesting, but I am new to the PHP5 and OOP it uses and there's VERY LITTLE help on Kohana, I even tried to buy books but there are none. CodeIgniter has a lot of helpful material, but it has no official Authentication module with Access Control, and the three open-source modules I have tested did not integrate well with other modules I am using.

Please can anyone recommend another OOP PHP framework with a quick learning curve, or provide some pointers to resolve the problems I had with those 3 frameworks tested, or should I just develop the entire application out of the box after studying OOP extensively? Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

There are frameworks, that provide an authentication natively but there is no way, that you can learn those in two weeks AND finish your project.

CodeIgniter was the first framework I learned and it was the perfect choice for me: The documentation is really good: reading the documentation enabled me to fully understand the MVC pattern. If I was in your position I would definitely use codeigniter and integrate one of the many free authentication plugins discussed here.

After you finished your project, you can go on and start learning symfony and Zend Framework, depending on your preferences.