Comparing PHP Frameworks ( Symfony, CakePHP, YII and CodeIgniter)

I went through the exersice of choosing a PHP Framework, i found it really hard to decide since most of them are similar and there are many good frameworks out there, however at the end i narrowed down to 4 frameworks and the winner was Symfony

To decide i had to try a simple application with each Framework

Why Symfony

Symfony is an enterprise level framework which is used by Yahoo and other big websites, it is proven and powerful, also Symfony 2 overcomes all problems of old symfony versions like speed, templating ... etc

Also when i used it i found it well structured, relatively easy to learn, it provides a very good command line and the ORM was great (Symphony uses Doctrine)


Why Not Others

Warning: some of the reasons are more subjective than objective

CakePHP was easy to learn and you will have a great community support but i disliked the ORM and the naming convention constraints, i wasn't moving fast when i used it


CodeIgniter is very easy, fast but it is more simple than what i was looking for and has no ORM

Yii is lovely however the model/module generation is done using GUI plug-in ( i didn't investigate other options) and i didn't like the folder structuring and the generated code, however if i didn't use Symfony i would have used YII

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