Question

I am in the process of migrating to a new PHP Framework. I have been involved in heavy development using the CodeIgniter Framework, but I am finding it a little too lightweight for my needs now.

I have boiled my choices down to either Zend Framework or Symfony. I know the learning curve for both is relatively high. However, I just wanted to get a rough idea of which will be worth getting stuck into (as I will be spending quite a lot of time getting familiar with the chosen framework).

If it helps narrow the answer down a little. I am not looking to build a simple blog or anything like that. I am in need for something that will support full-fledged development of e-commerce systems, customer relationship managers and content management systems.

Answer 1

Personally i have been working with ZF since it was in version 1.6, and i am pretty happy with it , I had seen very good improvement since 1.6 , but i think ZF missing some ideas :

1- ORM and later on very great implementation between ZF + Doctrine 1.2 has taken very popularity
and i honestly depend on ZF + Doctrine in many projects
and these days we can see great integration between ZF + Doctrine2

2- the symfony’s bundle is completely forgotten in ZF
Do you think Zend framework misses the Symfony's Bundle principle ?
and i think its really indeed to see it soon (hopefully in ZF 2 )

3- i had many good points about symfony 1

     - doctrine built in support 
     - bundle principle 
     - admin generators which can  save a lot of time
     - symfony plugins is very popular 
     - symfony documentation is really good 

finally , i had took a deep look at symfony 1 but i am really taken by the buzz of symfony2 in the late of 2010 and till today its public preview http://symfony.com/download
and i am trying to spend some time learning it .

wish me luck 🙂

update
I don’t want my answer to imply that ZF isn’t good or symfony is better than ZF , ZF IMO very powerful library and being ZF developer === advanced + powerful PHP OOP programmer .