Best PHP Frameworks to Use with Frontend Web Frameworks

• February 23, 2016
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At the moment there are plenty of PHP frameworks available in the market to choose from. But choosing the right framework relies on the type of project and its scale. You can always work on a project by utilizing custom PHP, however, due to high level of characterization required for the structure and keeping up your code it’s more time consuming.

If you utilize a framework then you can substitute the time and manpower involved in custom PHP and simply oversee the project. A PHP framework can manage multiple tasks. Frameworks are also handy because:

• They speed up the development of project
• They’re Well-organized, reusable and maintainable code
• They’re predominantely scalable
• They enhances site security
• MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern to ensure the separation of views and logic
• Object-oriented programming

So if you’ve decided to move forward with a framework you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the most compatible frontend and backend counterparts. All these frameworks have their own pros and cons, you can choose any one of them depending upon your needs.

1- Laravel

Laravel has been the most popular PHP framework in the last year. It is simple to use and standardized. It has almost everything that any developer could know or would need to know. That is why, it is so hugely popular.

Features:

• Well documented with screenshots via laracast.com.
• Fast application development.
• It has a built-in light weight template engine “Blade” which is specially designed for frontend developers.
• It has a clean and simple syntax.
• It provides features such as authentication, sessions, queuing, caching, restful routing and many more.

Compatible Frontend Frameworks:

Laravel works best with CSS frameworks that support LESS (Leaner CSS) and SASS (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets)

2- Symfony

This PHP framework is a set of PHP web applications and also happens to be community, all working together for MVC applications. Added bonus? Symfony is a free software.

Features:

• Symfony has a wide developer community making it the second most used PHP framework by developers.
• It has PHP libraries that are reusable.
• It provides built-in features like form creation, object configuration, routing, authentication, templating and many more

3- CodeIgniter

An MVC based PHP framework which is light weight and specially built for developers who need a simple and clean code to create highly featured web applications.

Features:

• CodeIgniter is able to avoid PHP version conflict
• It is based on MVC architecture and development
• It has Controller, Models, Views classes. Controller class is a must, but Models and Views are optional
• User can define custom naming conventions

4- CakePHP

CakePHP is a free and MVC based PHP framework. It makes web applications development simpler and faster. It uses software engineering and design pattern concepts. It has a separate database access layer. Fun fact; Its model is based on ruby on rails.

Features:

• Easy to learn
• Fast and flexible templating system
• Integrated CRUD (create, read, update and delete) for fast development
• Has built-in feature for security, email, session, cookie, request handling and many more

Frontend Frameworks:

5- Phalcon

It is the most powerful PHP framework with regards to performance. With an MVC based architecture. It is written as a C-extension for web servers. Its architecture makes it the fastest PHP framework ever built!

Features:

• The Fastest PHP framework
• Highest level of performance optimization
• Decreases resource usage
• Provide features such as universal auto-loader, asset management, security, translation, caching and many more

You can also choose other popular PHP frameworks for your projects such as Zend (for enterprise level applications), Yii (simple & evolutionary PHP framework with high-performance optimization), etc.