which mvc or engine should i start on?

Question

i have been programming php modules and websites from scratch and building sites for customers is taking forver. people have told me to stick to an mvc or engine like (joomla,wordpress,drupal, etc).

what I'm wondering is since i'm new to all this which one do you guys prefer i start with?

an mvc or an engine (joomla,wordpress etc...)

i've seen the top mvc's that exist out their and the popular ones which are cakephp and zend my question is to be able to develop with zend dont i need a software installation on my pc?

thanks

Answer 1

I think by MVC you mean CMS. Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla are all content management systems.

MVC stands for Model-View-Controller, an architectural pattern often used in web programming.

CakePHP and the Zend Framework are both MVC frameworks, in that they support MVC out of the box (if you decide to use their MVC system - you can use some components as stand-alone classes).

I've not used Cake, although I have used Zend a bit so I can answer your Zend question. You don't need to install anything - I think you're thinking of the Zend Editor (an Eclipse plugin) which has support for the Zend Framework. If you download the framework and follow the quick-start guide you should see how to use it.

Answer 2

Check out http://www.phpframeworks.com for a comparison of PHP frameworks.

Answer 3

Don't forget Code Igniter