Ask HN: CakePHP? CodeIgniter? Symfony? Other?

by woodsier on 11/29/2008, 12:03 AM with 12 comments

I'm interested in what the HN community has to say about these PHP frameworks?

What makes them different from each other?

What makes each better/worse and why?

All things considered, what is your favorite?

  • by qhoxie on 11/29/2008, 1:31 AM

    Kohana is my favorite PHP framework by a long shot. The developers are very bright and they work hard to incorporate the wants and needs of the community, without diluting quality. It is PHP5 only, though.

    Use CodeIgniter if you need PHP4. The two are similarly flexible and light.

  • by eisokant on 11/29/2008, 12:09 AM

    I have only tried CodeIgniter so I can only speak for that but it is by far the best decision I have made to move to this MVC framework. It's holds a lot of libraries and helpers which will simplify most tasks and they are incredibly easy to extend. It's downside though is that you're not able to call functions internally from other controllers but once you get used to that it doesn't pose many problems. I would recommend you having a look at their documentation (which is very well done) and a demo video.

  • by noodle on 11/29/2008, 1:08 AM

    codeigniter is a good purely MVC framework that doesn't add much extra overhead to your project (by default -- you can pull in plenty of overhead with the external libraries and such). if you want the MVC separation but don't want to be weighted down by other things and like to hack around in php, its a good choice.

    cake/symfony/etc. are rapid development frameworks that try and recreate some of the magic of rails in php form. they're very good to get somewhere quick. they do suffer from a bit of feature bloat and performance problems if you're planning for a large application down the line.

    i've used them all, i like them all. having said that, i would hands-down go with codeigniter on every project IF they were to pull together a better community and form better community code and libraries. for example, it took me forever to get a simple, working, secure authorization library in codeigniter, including having to mess around with the module myself to do what i wanted it to do. it comes fully functional in cakephp.

    just my $0.02

  • by dchest on 11/29/2008, 12:11 AM

    CodeIgniter is OK, but the first question is -- do you really need any PHP framework? It's not hard to get MVC in a few lines of code without any framework.

  • by teej on 11/29/2008, 4:02 AM

    Anything but Symfony.

  • by mattdennewitz on 11/29/2008, 5:17 PM

    phreeze is my pick when django isnt an option