The Yii PHP framework
I have been using CodeIgniter since mid-August 2009 and I absolutely love it. However, I get bored very easily, I like change, so I decided I would look for another PHP framework that had a little more functionality baked in. I had tried CakePHP before trying CodeIgniter and I didn’t really like it; I thought it was too bloated. After a little bit of research, a couple framework look really appealing to me. Here is the full list along with links to their home page:
I haven’t actually tried all of those frameworks, but they all look really appealing and I know that at some point I am going to use them all to create a website. All those frameworks are PHP 5 only. Dingo and Kohana are the ones that are the most similar to CodeIgniter and I didn’t really played around with Solar or DooPHP, but I looked at the source of all the frameworks and they all look well written with clean code, indentation, comments, etc.
Recess and Yii stand out though. Especially Recess. However, Recess is not maintained as regularly as Yii. Now I won’t really talk exentsively about Recess, I’m just going to say that you can generate Models and Controllers via a web interface or a command line utility (which is really cool) and that it has a RESTful API (which is even cooler).
Yii also has a command line tool that is very simple, very straight forward. It’s very similar to Rails without the bloat. It’s modular, it supports relationships, it’s a rapid developement framework that is also lightweight and faster than CodeIgniter, I love it. The cherry on the cake is that it has a really nice documentation, especially a couple Guides that you can download in PDF and that will teach you to build a blog for instance. Finally, when you download Yii it comes with a demos folder where you can find a couple web apps built with Yii to give the user a good exemple of how the framework works.
I only mentioned some of the nice features of Yii, and it would be a shame to just trust me when I say that it’s an awesome framework, you should try it!
Final note: I still love CodeIgniter and will probably never stop using it unless I have to. But I also like to try new things.