Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

PHP

Posted by Mark Flavin
Mark Flavin
10,199 Points

What frameworks do you use?

I am looking at learning a framework for PHP and wondering what if any frameworks the treehouse community has used. If you can provide some pros and cons as well as any experiences you think could be relevant.

Thanks in advance :)

4 Answers

Randy Hoyt
STAFF
Randy Hoyt
Treehouse Guest Teacher
Randy Hoyt
Randy Hoyt
Treehouse Guest Teacher

I'm pretty sure CakePHP is not the most widely-used PHP framework. I don't have any good stats in front of me, but:

  • Zend dominates the framework market for actual usage. I'd say it's too large for projects outside of a corporate, enterprise-y environment.
  • Symfony is the one I hear talked about most at conferences: a PHP conference in Miami early next year has a whole Symfony track. It's good for medium-sized teams, but it's probably a bit too large for a small project team.

If you want to learn a PHP framework as an experiment or programming exercise, I'd try Laravel. If you want to learn a PHP framework to build something real today, I'd try CakePHP or CodeIgniter.

George Buckingham
George Buckingham
1,216 Points
George Buckingham
George Buckingham
1,216 Points

Hi Mark,

I’ve only got a good grasp of the Yii framework (http://www.yiiframework.com/). It’s a good framework. It can be extended using a plugin-like system, and it’s very lightweight. Another very important thing to look at is the documentation/support - both of these are very strong for Yii.

Some other frameworks you might like to take a look at: Laravel (http://laravel.com/), CakePHP (http://cakephp.org/), CI (http://ellislab.com/codeigniter), and Symfony (http://symfony.com/). Each has certain types of projects it’s more suited to. For example, I know Yii is great for many MVC projects, but especially those that need quite a lot of customisation from the routing/authentication side.

Hope that helps!

Randy Hoyt
STAFF
Randy Hoyt
Treehouse Guest Teacher
Randy Hoyt
Randy Hoyt
Treehouse Guest Teacher

Hey Mark,

George's list looks good to me. CakePHP is the one I have worked with the most, and I think it's a good one to try first. I'd walk through their Blog Tutorial. Laravel is pretty young and would be good to experiment with, but I probably wouldn't build a real project with it yet. A lot of people in the PHP community use Symfony, but that might be a bit much for getting started.

James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points
James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points

Randy can correct me if I'm wrong, I believe CakePHP is the most widely use PHP framework out there.

Frameworks are designed to make the impossible do-able, they don't always make hard things, easy. My point is that unless this is large project it may be easier to not use a Framework at all.