PHP Framework / Library Suggestions for a Backend

Question

I am about to start to developing backend site of a php project. Companies and site admins will login to this site and manage their data on the project.

My previous admin panel experiences were full of agony and pain. So I want to make sure that I choose correct tools for my purpose.

By the way, please note, I'm not looking for scaffolding. There won't be much tables in my database. Instead, there will be complex logic between entities.

I want clear seperation of markup and logic code and easy-to-use and standardized user-interface.

Thank you.

Edit:

I understand this is very subjective. This is why I call it suggestion. I want to try a few of chunks of code before going along with one of them.

Answer 1

There is no perfect answer for this, it depends a lot of your (and your team) programming experience and your project's requirements.

As it talks about PHP and backoffice, I suggest you look at symfony framework. It's a RAD framework with great admin features and tons of plugins easing backpanel developement.

I understand you don't want scaffolding, in symfony you can choose to use a very customizable admin generator or build your own forms/listings (or mix between both, using generated as a good code base and extending it).

It comes with a great separation of concerns as it uses MVC paradigm, but aside from MVC it has form management sub-framework which can help a lot developing backoffice.

Be careful if you're not familiar with PHP5 OOP and MVC it could be little complex to learn and understand, but if your planning could allow you to have time to learn symfony programming, it's an experience I would recommand to every PHP developer.

This framework is very well documented, and as an introduction tutorial they offer a class around a website example with its backend application.

Of course, this is subjective and others would perhaps recommend you other choices.

Answer 2

Only recently went through a couple of frameworks about a month ago for a site I was working on and found CodeIgniter was easiest to get up and running and had the best documentation and tutorials.

http://codeigniter.com/

Alternatives are symphony, cakePHP and Kohona