Best frameworks for PHP website development

2015 is here! So much has changed as far as PHP is concerned for the past 365 days, and the PHP structure scene is now even more populated than any time in the past. Like many other website designer, I have a clear idea of what makes up that great PHP framework for website development. At the end of the day, let’s post this question – do you even know which framework actually ends up being incorporated into the subsequent production projects? How many of those design frameworks surpass that stage whereby people just perform a demonstration app in them?

Forums such as Quora have posed some of these questions in a bid to identify the best frameworks that professionals employ. I have mentioned some of the responses from this trusted online forum. Still, most users have experience on just a single PHP framework and it’s somehow as pointless as it would be to ask someone what their favorite bars are if they drink at just one place. Having said that, let’s visit some of these frameworks and analyse them in the light of what you can expect from using them for your website development needs.

It’s very important to understand that WordPress and its fellow suites are NOT frameworks. If you have just used one framework and looking for what others have to say regarding the rest of the frameworks, then keep reading.

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Majority of the respondents on Quora.com seem to think the best frameworks for PHP are:

  1. Laravel
  2. Phalcon
  3. Symfony2
  4. CodeIgniter / Yii both.

Over half of the responses recommend Laravel. For instance, an anonymous web developer and engineer recommends Laravel and says “Since I discovered Laravel, I haven’t looked back again!”

Analysing the responses, Laravel seems to be the most favored of all since it offers virtually no learning curve. It also offers an excellent documentation, excellent community support as well as speedy website development. One other consistent advantage regarding Laravel by the Quora community is that it also offers an impressively alive and active IRC channel where you can always get the help you need, instantly.

One intriguing misconception I realised regarding Laravel is that it’s responsible for Composer. Even at Quora, still people find Composer as the major benefit of using Laravel besides Eloquent ORM as well as Blade engines. It is therefore flat out-odd seeing the Composer as a package manager that is purely oblivious to the framework it’s used with, if any. An article like this one will actually shed more light on Composer. As far as am concerned, Laravel piqued my interest enough to make me build by next production projects in it bearing in mind that its HHVM powered.

Then here comes Phalcon. The major benefit regarding this framework is its performance over several other PHP frameworks. Moreover, the fact that this framework provides such as rounded up package (template engine, ORM, PHQL and much more –all in a single package –little or just no need for other third party libs, which means that everything else stays C-based, in memory and super fast). Some of the respondents on Quora mentioned the fact that Phalcon can also work as an extension. This is another major advantage of this framework since the process of installing simply weeds out any hobbyists from the serious, dedicated website development experts. Personally, I agree with this notion. When finding some of its drawbacks, it turned out that its major setback is also its greatest advantage –the capability to write it in C, it’s clearly nigh impossible to check under the carpet.

Greg Szczotka, web developer and IT trainer unchecks the rest of the PHP frameworks saying they belong in the past and that you should just use Symfony2. Personally, I know Symfony to be quite bloated and quite slow due to the fact that its feature-rich.

Conclusion

Aside from what people had to say on Quora, which is the best framework to work with for PHP website development? From my own point of view, I am a big fan of Phalcon. After testing all these PHP frameworks, I can strongly conclude that all of them are almost similar except for Zend that stands aside like a sore thumb. It’s at this point that I begun using Phalcon in my website development projects. This framework is sufficient covered in this article. Suffice to conclude that Phalcon is a blazingly fast framework that is preloaded in memory and allows you to work wonders as far as your cloud bills are concerned regardless of whether you use Azure, AWS or any others –its delightfully shaves off the instance hours –lets handle more of that in a different post.

If you have a Gold Coast web development project to which you wish to invite Ignition Media to look at, call (07) 55 687 515 to speak with me. I’ll be more than happy to provide further information regarding our web development service.

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