PHP Frameworks

Mr. Loverman · 19-08-2012 6:51am #1

Hi all

I've previously worked as a PHP developer, but for the past few years I've mostly been working in QA.

I am looking to modernise my PHP skills so I'm thinking of learning how to use the Zend Framework and use an IDE such as Zend Studio instead of my usual editor which is vim.

I was wondering if any of you have any advice regarding learning PHP frameworks and in general what advanced PHP topics you think are useful to learn.

My general programming skills are very good (e.g. I have previously written an elliptic curve cryptography application using C, and used to do a lot of Perl/C++ stuff) but I'm a little old school so need some advice on updating my PHP skills!

Cheers

Creamy Goodness · 19-08-2012 6:09pm

Zend studio is quite rubbish unless you are using the zend framework. the IDE is very buggy (course it is it's build of eclipse).

symfony is another framework that seems popular - http://www.symfony-project.org so is codeigniter - http://codeigniter.com

my personal favourites would be:

fuelPHP - http://fuelphp.com
lithium - http://lithify.me

MyPeopleDrankTheSoup · 20-08-2012 5:39pm

I've used a lot of PHP IDE's and PHPStorm blows them all way. It's based off the IntelliJ Java IDE if you've ever come across it. It's $150 but check out the trial version.

I jumped between CodeIgniter and Zend Framework before settling on ZF. I can't remember a reason why! The ecosystems are about the same, roughly same number of questions on StackOverflow which I think is a good indicator of community size. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/zend-framework and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/codeigniter.

I learn best by reading code and good, *current* open source projects using either framework were hard to find. I think there's a fragmentation problem with PHP frameworks which is an advantage of Ruby on Rails and their built in framework.