Just in case you haven’t noticed, the PHP community is now split in two – on the one hand we have developers who use normal “out of the box” PHP and on the other hand we have developers who use frameworks. I must confess that I spent rather a long time resisting the whole frameworks scene. However, after a few years of stubborn resistance I was finally persuaded into tuning into the frameworks way of doing things.

A good PHP framework should improve security, make websites easier to upgrade and should also dramatically reduce the time it takes you to build websites and web applications. Personally speaking, I’ve discovered another benefit of using frameworks which is seldom documented. You see, before frameworks appeared on the scene it was a challenge to keep on top of all of the emerging technologies for the web. A good PHP framework, however, should help you to keep on top of everything that’s new and hip in the world of web development – without having to learn a bunch of brand new technologies. Need a PDF generator? Your framework should be able to handle that. How about an RSS feed? No problem! Or, how about one of those fancy auto complete features for a search form? Well, sure enough, there’s frameworks that can produce those too.

The big question that a lot of developers are asking these days is, “What is the best PHP framework?”