I have been testing PHP Frameworks for several weeks now as I have some plans to re-launch a site using this technology. A primary feature of the framework should be based on PHP 5, and preferably lightweight.
My first choice was Zend Framework as it is backed up by Zend Technology, the company behind PHP.
After several weeks of testing I gave up. Zend Framework is not for beginners. Then I tried Kohana. Despite good reviews about Kohana, personally I am disappointed with its strict naming conventions. I might be wrong that that’s how I felt. Then I tried Yii Framework. It is one of the newest PHP frameworks. Some developers despise as it uses command line.
It took me sometime to setup Yii with Xampp in a windows environment. Once the setup is up and running, using the command line is a breeze. It creates a skeleton but workable model and controller. Though the documentations do not provide so much information, the demos provided some good ideas on how tos. The Yii Enhanced Blog on Google also is a good source of re-usable codes particularly the Portlet Class.
My Yii Application is still far from complete but I am happy with the development. I might be able to upload it sooner than I expected. It changed my attitude towards frameworks that it may take longer to learn the framework itself than coding the application directly.