What PHP framework is the easiest to learn and the fastest to develop with?

Question

I have a couple of preliminary goals:

• choose a framework for small in-house projects that other developers (with less experience in PHP) could use
• choose a framework that, once I've learned it, I can develop with quickly

Overall, the whole goal is to save development time. Though there are other developers in our organization, I tend to do the most actual development, and even I don't even usually spend over half my time coding.

The ones I've looked at briefly are CakePHP, Yii, and CodeIgniter. My understanding is that Yii is very fast to process (great), but harder to learn than CakePHP (more important from our perspective). CodeIgniter I know less about, just that some like it more, and some less.

What is the best framework for this situation?

Thanks for your thoughts.

Answer 1

CakePHP is pretty extensible, has lots of information online and is about as easy as frameworks get.

Answer 2

Well there are several good ones out there. It all depends on what you need:

• CodeIgniter: I use this in most cases, it's lightweight and very performant. It's also easy to extend it with extra functionality. Disadvantages are that it does not provide you with code generation or a standard ORM (you could however edit it to use f.i. Doctrine.
• CakePHP: I have some experience with this. Provides code generation (through a command line interface) and ships with an ORM. Allows you to develop realy fast, however if you want specific things you'll have to do some nasty coding (COC)

CodeIgniter's by far the easiest to learn. It doesn't require expert PHP knowledge (if you can work with PHP, you can work with CI) and it's very easy to get started. In my experience, it enables a fast development, however maintenance can be hard. Which is why I would suggest using it together with Doctrine or another ORM. I have extended my version of CI with lots of extra functionality (including the use of Smarty to render my views), so if you'd like to start using CI, let me know.

A more complete overview of available frameworks can be found here.

EDIT: Dropped Zend Framework from the overview. IMO CodeIgniter's much easier to learn than CakePHP.

Answer 3

I was starting with Kohana 3 PHP MVC Framework. I think that it is a good way to learn a basic principles of MVC, OOP and PHP in common. After 1 month of learning Kohana I started use Zend Framework. It is more hard.

Answer 4

Zend Framework & Yii for big projects, Kohana 3, Code Igniter for middle projects. Fat-Free Framework for small & middle projects.

Answer 5

I was working with th YII http://www.yiiframework.com

It is an MVC Framework, with an commandline interface. This Framework can create an entire CRUD-Page for you within minutes.

YII is MVC, so after creating a project with YII, it seems hard to understand, why there are so many files an folders for a simple task. But after working with it, it starts to become easy, because you know where to find witch code.