I’m not able to “rationally” evaluate if it’s true but for a Yii adept, it’s …always good to hear !! 
I’m not able to “rationally” evaluate if it’s true but for a Yii adept, it’s …always good to hear !!
It’s good to hear, but Zend, Symphony, CodeIgniter and Yii are very, very different.
The only one which comes close to Yii is CakePHP.
Yii is simple an amazing PHP framework. Probably the best PHP framework together Zend.
I am learning Zend at the moment but being an avid Yii user I recommend you go with Yii. Zend is powerful but mostly usable to find a job as it is the prefered framework by most of the companies as for starting your own project don’t think twice … Yii yourself.
Yii is the best!
I am having this problem now. In the past me and the other developer have just been hardcoding everything ourselves. We had a small library, and a very basic MVC framework that we built ourselves, but last week we decided we wanted to try a new project using a framework.
I have been tasked to research the different frameworks and come up with what would be solution that would fit us the best.
I have my eye on Zend 2, Yii, Symfony 2.
I took a brief look at CodeIgnitor and did not agree with their coding practice (mainly I saw codeigniter.com/user_guide/libraries/form_validation.html#cascadingrules and hated that way they do it). Looks like it is also too basic. Would make a great framework for someone just starting out in PHP.
Zend looked interesting (especially zend 2). I honestly thing I like their coding style the best out of all the frameworks that I have briefly looked at, however it looks like the downside is that if you need to customize anything in anyway you will need to write A LOT of code. It seems extremely ‘enterprisy’.
Symfony 2 – I actually haven’t had a chance to dig in with this framework yet, looks interesting, but also looks a bit bloated. Can’t really give an opinion on it.
Yii- So far it seems really good. I wish it used namespaces, but I would assume that is on the roadmap for version 2. I really like how it generates a lot of the basic code for you with gii. The extensions support is also great. I agree with most of the coding practices, however I think arrays are used too much. I prefer to use objects myself (since you get type hinting from IDE)
So far I am leaning towards yii, but going to look into Symfony a bit.
IMO, if you want to make a choice, choose the right alternatives! 
Take this PHP Framework MVC Benchmark for instance.
Laravel, Flourish, FatFree, FuelPHP, BareBones, DooPHP, MicroMVC, …
Here is the ultimate list:
This is my top list of frameworks to check out in detail:
Laravel
Flourish
FuelPHP
Elefant
This webpage seems to be outdated even if it was written in 2012 
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Codeigniter(2.1) by default is a bit faster than Yii for me: after doing some benchmark with a basic app, these 2 are pretty similar, but CI2 have an advantage. What’s making Yii better for me is his modular approach and tools.
Symfony 2 have an amazing community, but I’ve done the same benchmark and it is 2 times slower than Yii. And it seems to make you write more code and configuration.
Fuelphp is something that I would like seeing grow in popularity, I like their approach.
To me, Laravel and Flourish bests FuelPHP, but I could be wrong of course.
Another great option is Elephant - it’s a bit like Yii meets Wordpress (without the gunk AFAIK).
I don’t know flourish, it’s the first time I see this name I think.
Laravel seems great, but all the API breaks makes me run from it.
And for Elefant, that seems nice! But it seems to have a small community, sadly.
What makes me like FuelPHP is that it’s not hard to migrate to it from Codeigniter, so it’s a great way to make the change to real PHP5 kinda easily. But it’s not perfect.
Considering what’s important for me, Yii seems the best . speed & simplicity & community.
I was very interested in FuelPHP, but after seeing the benchmark, I became suspicious.
Look how it compares to Yii and Laravel.
Memory usage and requests by seconds shows that it lags behind Yii.
Laravel is consistently better than Yii.
Judging from the benchmark.
Where CI and Yii are pretty alike.
Of course, there are other factors.
But so far it seems like the FuelPHP team needs to do some optimization work.
I don’t consider ColaPHP since it’s commercial AFAIK.
And MicroMVC seems to be having a really small (non-exsistent?) community and almost no docs.
But Yii is great - and the reason why I’m still here.
I just wish Yii had better asset handling… 
From my quick tests FuelPHP was performing better than Symfony and was not that far from Yii, possibly because I was testing the 1.2 version. Anyway they are doing a new major version, I’m hoping that it will be better .
Laravel may be really fast on hello world, but if they are changing the API all the time, It doesn’t motivate me to use it 
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But I’m really looking forward to see the Yii 2 release 
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