I'd like to know what you think. Is it worth it to become proficient with Zend or adapt it as my common solution?
Do you find it widely supported enough to build applications with which you can mass distribute?
Any input would be great.
I am not looking at this from a career perspective, more a business perspective as a freelancer, or software developer.
EDIT 1:
Anybody know of any widely distributed commercial scripts which are built on Zend?
What about other frameworks, like CI or CakePHP?
Zend is a framework, a tool. So being a freelancer, it might be the tool for the job on a special situation, according to your own criteria.
It is widely supported, quite active in development, and popular. And it won't hurt to learn the Zend way. I've been sent to check Zend code on several occations, when looking for design/programming/convention decisions, so I guess it's pretty well written code.
From a business perspective, I guess it adds to your CV, since it's one of the widest used PHP Frameworks.
If you come to feel comfortable with it, you could use it regularly as a common solution. But don't rely completely on a framework. I guess you already feel comfortable enough on PHP that you want to widen your toolset, so this might come as an obvious advice.
Just my two cents.
Zend Framework isn't just a MVC framework, it is a pretty solid library containing a lot of functionality that can be used in other frameworks or on 'vanilla' PHP code. Becoming familiar with what ZF contains doesn't obligate you to using the framework, and simply adds to your toolset.
ZF has a number of things going for it if you're writing your own software for your own business. I can think of two bigguns:
It's a pretty darned good framework. It strikes a nice balance between solving common problems for you (and doing it pretty well), and not being preachy and restrictive. You can use/reuse ZF's components (or your own domain-specific classes built on/around them) across different areas, because the ZF philosophy is loose-coupling.
It's a pretty popular framework. If you're wildly successful, and end up shopping for developers to help push you to your 2.0, you can find smart folks who know the framework, and will be that much more productive because of it.
I've recently started a side project, which will be a niche SaaS sort of thing. It'll be a ZF-driven web services interface that drives a javascript-driven in-browser client (that might end up being an AIR app at some point).
So far it's been working out well.
As a freelancer, I often feel cut off from learning resources that would otherwise be available in a team/office environment. I have found working with Zend Framework to be extremely helpful in learning best practices for application architecture, code-re-use, separation of concerns, and coding conventions.
The learning curve felt a bit steep to me, but I realize now that I was not just learning ZF-specific content, but also general development concepts.
The community is active and I have found many of them to be very helpful and encouraging.
I have made ZF my default choice for new projects and on my legacy sites, I have been able to successfully employ many of the components.
I recommend ZF very highly.
altough YES! If you watch Twitter for Zend Framework you will find a lot of job offers for freelancers with Zend Framework expierence.