I’ve been working with PHP for about 5 years now, and am starting to get into PHP frameworks. I’ve grown accustomed to using and customizing existing CMS’s to meet my needs, (such as Joomla!, WordPress, Magento and the like) but I think it’s about time to “graduate” and start writing my own code.

With the advances in PHP 5.3, I know that I want to learn a framework that implements those advances in every way possible – they are that good. I’ll go over those in another post. So far, I’ve come across two very promising PHP 5.3+ frameworks – Fuel and Laravel.

FUEL PHP

Fuel is the lovechild of Dan Horrigan and Phil Sturgeon (along with some others – Jelmer) and is really awesome. I was digging through the docs, and came across some very cool and useful things. Out of all of them, I would have to say the most useful is the OIL package which offers a command line interface for Fuel and makes scaffolding, database migrations, and project creation a breeze and allows you to focus on what’s important – the functionality of your program.

LARAVEL

Laravel is another great new option in the PHP5.3+ framework arena. What makes Laravel stand out is its focus on Routes. Routes in Laravel reside in a single “routes.php”
file and replaces the “controllers” (and hence, the idea of MVC) found in most other frameworks. This (I think) really fits my coding style better – as I’m able to wrap my head around this concept and style of coding a little better than MVC.

Along with routes, another great part of Laravel is it’s Eloquent ORM. From the docs page, “It is named ‘Eloquent’because it allows you to work with your database objects and relationships using an eloquent and expressive syntax.” Check the link and read up on the docs to see why it is so awesome.

More to come on both of these frameworks…