What the best PHP framework? In your opinion, obviously

None.
And no I’m not anti-php.

Frameworks like symfony and laveral are great and do a lot to keep dev overheads down.

But frameworks like all frameworks come prebuilt to do more then you will use. For small - medium projects it makes sense to use a framework where you need to punch something out quickly, but when you reach a point your changing features every other day, going back to native is a god send , although the pitfalls the frameworks try to solve, you will need to deal with yourself, but that’s not to bad overall plus you can just build exactly what is needed.

There is no best PHP framework, only some more or less usable ones 😉

It always depends on what you need

Laravel. Symfony is great but good luck learning it. Start with laracasts and you will be golden. And yeah I get the whole "I am a hardcore programmer and build my own stuff in PHP" but I personally never had that much time to micromanage complex projects.

We use Slim 3 and I really like it. It's simple, not bloated, and provides great essentials.

@dfox Slim 3 looks really interesting. I had a look a few days ago at it for migrating our 15 years old legacy ticketing and cmdb system to it

I really love Laravel 😊

My personal favorite? Use composer packages yourself. I once created a small minimalistic 'framework' that would do autoloading and routes for me. The rest wasn't needed.

I intend to take a look at Laravel and Composer. What do you think of CakePHP?

Slim framework is really great. We create all our APIs with Slim.

As a person who came in web from C/C++ and is worried about performance of every written line of code, I'd have to say Phalcon.

Symfony for big projects, Silex for small ones. The nice thing about the symfony stack is that its part are standalone components that you can reuse also in legacy projects.

Laravel for a web app and lumen for an API.

Really, distrust anybody who recommends any single one for every single problem. It comes down to what you feel comfortable with, what your project needs, and what you feel will aid and not hinder you.

Personally, I love Symfony, and its many incarnations and remixes for different types of projects. Laravel is one such remix.

@C0D4 would you say the same for things like angular and vue for JS? Im pretty low-level still and looking for some thoughts. I know including jQuery just to use a couple functions is overkill, but JS frameworks tend to have tons of functionality that, while possible, would be very difficult to replicate with Vanilla JS

@Crazed
JS frameworks, are an issue of there own.

Putting the work in yourself to rebuild some of these frameworks for Js is just not worth the time or effort.
What’s a few extra KB of bloat for a JS library if your making use of a fair few features in it? If your using a CDN then the chances are that JS framework is already cached by the browser, plus if you use the minified versions that 400K library will only be 20Kb-40Kb or so if it’s cached.

I agree shoving Jquery in to only use something like $.post() is overkill and you should just grab the vanilla Ajax method and wrap it in a reuasable function if that’s all your doing.

@C0D4 Thanks for the advice, that's what Ive heard too, that you can easily just use the vanilla js from the jquery source code rather than including the entire library if you don't need much. I'm still pretty early on in my career so trying to get the best practices down early.