Question

Once you begin to build a site with a PHP Framework are you locked in from that point forward to have to continue to use such framework?

I have not used a framework yet and don’t know if 50% (or any arbitrary number) of the way through the project you decide you no longer want to use the framework, at this point do you need to rebuild from day 1 to continue on without it?

Specifically I am looking at the possibility of using Yii but I want more of a generic answer.

Answer 1

It depends on the framework you use and how extensively you use it. I will give you two contrasting examples.

Zend Framework

I recently developed a website completely in Zend Framework, this includes using ZFs’ MVC. I used none of my own written code and relied solely on the frameworks built in classes to achieve the tasks I wanted to achieve. If I was to re-write this site without ZF I would need to start from the beginning.

Codeigniter

Codeigniter is known as a light-weight framework, as with most frameworks you can choose to use certain classes or rely solely on the framework. If I started a website with Codeigniter I could decide to use class X or Y to achieve a requirement of the website (the same with Zend). If I wanted to stop using Codeigniter, I would only need to re-write the functions that used classes X or Y.

Basically, it depends on how extensively you use a framework.