The Academic Site of Velonis I. Petros

First of all, I must say that there is no "best" framework. We all have different  criteria and needs. If framework  A fulfills your criteria or completes your needs you just use it.

Up until now, I was using the CMS and framework Joomla! but I decided to use something different for smaller applications, although in Joomla! 1.5 you can remove many default components. Joomla! is a very good framework and CMS and the upcoming version 1.6 is much better, more secure and easier to develop. Personally, I like the JForms class that will be added now.

Nevertheless I want to test something different. I had to create a small site and I used WordPress which is also good.  Looking in Wikipedia and in many other sites I saw that Yii and Kohana are upcoming frameworks. I won't repeat what I have read, like info for CodeIgniter and CakePHP. Symfony is one of the best frameworks with a big community.

Filtering what I have read, I compared Symfony and Yii. Technically, they compete each other in many sectors and sometimes the first wins and others it loses. I have seen that Symfony has a bigger community but the Yii has a growing up community. They both use generators from command line but the difference , I noticed, between them is the fact that Symfony is more complex. If you are familiar with Symfony then it won't matter but if you want to try it from the beginning it does! Joomla!'s structure is not so complex in its components, modules and plugins. It is said that Yii can be used faster to create small web applications.

So, since Yii fulfills my criteria and has something better in Symfony, I decided to choose it. In August a book for Yii  will be published from Packt.

You can find some cheatsheets for Yii here and for for Symfony here and here.