I’ve been researching PHP frameworks for a couple of projects that are coming up. These seemed to emerge from jealousy at the rapid development possible with Ruby on Rails, which uses a model-view-controller (MVC) arrangement and a lot of useful convention-based shortcuts.

Cake was the one I had heard of, but I came to hear about several others, including Symfony and CodeIgniter, and these three eventually formed my shortlist. There were a number of factors in the choice: documentation for something that involves a lot of assumptions and a fairly steep learning curve has to be clear and up-to-date. CodeIgniter is the winner here.

Secondly, the strictness of adherence to MVC. Cake and Symfony require all three, but the model is optional for CodeIgniter.

There is little to choose between the frameworks in the functions they offer, such as validation and helpers with such things as links, forms and sessions. So the only thing to do was build a blog and see which made most sense while doing it. CodeIgniter’s video tutorial was good (build a blog in 20 minutes, just like Ruby on Rails!), Cake’s documentation was exposed as inadequate and I gave up on Symfony altogether. The CodeIgniter blog is built without using any models, making it perhaps an easier transitional framework. So CodeIgniter it is…