Thread

I’ve started to dig into the Zend Framework and I like what I see.  Unfortunately, the docs are a little bit all over the place and don’t necessarily appear to be fully updated.  In any case, I’m wondering what others think of the Zend Framework as it is now, and as it will fit into the future of PHP development.

I like it, there is a lot of cool stuff there.  At one point I messed around with it to the point where I had the basic functionality working and I thought it had the same feel to it as CodeIgniter.  Though the documentation is lacking, it is really very simple.  I feel good about investing the time into it because Zend is behind the effort.  It is also very modular so putting together the Zend pieces is like building a custom framework and I felt like I had a better grasp of the internals this way.  I also like that it is all PHP 5. 

That said, I am still using and plan to continue using CodeIgniter because I know the framework and I know it gets the job done.  When I have to get something done right now, I stick what I can get the job accomplished with… right now.  CodeIgniter also has a great company and great developers behind it.

The Zend Framework is a framework in the widest sense.  I don’t think it was meant to be a complete application like CodeIgniter.  There are a ton of libraries that can really be used anywhere.  I am sure you can take what you like and adapt it to CodeIgniter.  If you want a complete functioning framework out of the box then do some SE searching, there are frameworks out there based on the Zend library.

Using Zend framework requires that you always are running the latest version of PHP, something that is not always possible…

I don’t believe that is true.  While there is a recommendation to run on the latest stable version, the ZF website states it is compatible with v5.1.4+.