Originally Posted by
codecarnage
the Zend Framework is one of the most popular, but appears to be a royal pain in ***.
On the other hand CodeIgnitor provides a decent base, but is not a restrictive or intrusive as other main stream FW like Cake and ZF.
Yii looks nice from what I've just looked at, but I'm not sure whats it's like working with it...and thats the biggest problem. The people who use 1 particular framework get fairly good at it, hence the advocate that its the best...but let you try to pick it up..it's like purposefully sticking nails into your eyeballs.
Finally I would say that I typically don't established frameworks and started to work on some custom stuff earlier this year. Developing a custom solution is good in a sense because you are in control of the code base, granted you can get overwhelmed and carried away. A down side of doing on ur own is reinventing the wheel unless u can find bits and pieces of code that you can 'hack' together...and note that I said hack.
Not sure what bad experience jayrules had with CI but its worth a try, yii looks promising as I said b4 so keep it in mind...stay clear of ZF unless you like filing your own teeth with a buzz saw.