So I recently decided to look into some of the different PHP frameworks and pick the one I thought might be the best. I looked into CodeIgniter, Symfony and CakePHP but ultimately chose CakePHP. My decision came after researching and watching videos found on each framework’s website and checking out various speed tests. CakePHP seemed to be the most attractive to me. It has excellent documentation, a great website, and a fairly active community, plus I just liked the way it was organized and implemented more so than CodeIgniter or Symfony. CakePHP was the the slowest in speed tests though, but it wasn’t a large enough difference to worry me.
Initial Thoughts
My initial thought of CakePHP after getting it setup and looking over some of the documentation was “Wow this seems complicated”. There is a certain methodology behind CakePHP that should usually be followed closely, but there’s definitely a learning curve which made it kind of frustrating at times. I found myself searching Google often for anything that wasn’t covered specifically in the Cake Book. It seemed though that with every problem I solved, I learned a little bit more about Cake best/common practices which helped me become more familiar with the framework.
After working with it for a week or two
Once I got the hang of organization, validation, form automagic and Auth for user authentication, I was starting to fly through some of the things that initially took me an hour to implement. I really think it just comes down to being determined and not getting discouraged when it seems like you’ll never get the hang of it.
Conclusion
Overall I am very impressed with CakePHP and am kinda sad that I waited so long to start using it. The way it handles form validation is so simple and intuitive, all the auto-magic that happens behind the scenes is un-obtrusive yet very customizable and your code remains Object-Oriented and organized very logically. While I still don’t know much about CakePHP, I am confident that which each problem I solve, I will become that much more familiar with the framework and begin decreasing development time dramatically while maintaining a more organized code base. So, if you haven’t tried CakePHP, I suggest you do and tell me what you think!
