PHP5 - Frameworks of choice...

[tifosi]

One for the techies, geeks & php5 developers.

What is your PHP5 development framework of choice, and why?

 

[Aaron Clifford]

I've got a few classes that I use on all projects, for database, base functions that are used on most of the things I work on. I did use a custom template engine but am currently using Smarty.

I've tried some of the frameworks but unless your making a huge site with a large amount of features I've found them too much, often adding hundreds of files and tens of thousands of lines of code to a project that without a framework out be a lot more lightweight.

 

[tifosi]

I'm similar, have a lot of classes, snippets etc.

I stopped using template engines a long time ago in favour of native php using the alternative syntax for within views/templates, e.g for ... endfor.

Forgot to add Zend Framework to the list, but that one is just massive overkill for any but enterprise applications.

 

[monaghan]

I tend to use Drupal for a base framework to handle user accounts and so on and then build on top of that.

It is useful to have a standard framework structure to build things, but often, I find that a framework is too restrictive.

Smarty can be quite useful, but again often you can find that you're having to alter how you would code things to fit in with the presentation layer. Good discipline when working in a team or on a large project, but often overkill for the smaller projects.

Building a set of library functions is good, if these are built modular you can reduce the code footprint by just including what is needed rather than a whole bloated library.

Sometimes all you really need is a bit of simple procedural code forgetting about objects, frameworks and all these other goodies