While Kohana and CodeIgniter both offer a very flexible structure and let the developer code how ever he/she pleases, Symfony allows both freedom and enforces structure, which is again imperative for success on a large project with a larger team.

I’ve always felt that one of the primary goals of a PHP framework is to make the developer’s job easier. Symfony, actually seems to complicate matters, especially if you are trying to maintain someone else’s Symfony codebase. I’ve been involved with a massive Symfony project which had many developers, and I found it was a struggle to find the causes of many issues. This was mainly due to the way Symfony was used. I found that most of the developers wanted to use the controllers/actions to handle model tasks. This was frustrating.

Although I liked having the ability to override things and I liked the amount of plugins available for Symfony, I found it struggling to serve the purpose it was built for. A framework should make code easier to maintain, and it should make the code easier to write. I think CodeIgniter shines in both regards.

I’ve been creating some html and php video tutorials for my new site and I’ve been trying to decide which framework to use when I get to the series on PHP frameworks. I was going to just use CodeIngiter, but I think that I will also do a series on Kohana. That will give me a good reason to explore it again.

Thanks for the post!