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CakePHP and Symfony are the two 400 pound Gorillas in the PHP FW Arena. Zend Framework is being pushed big time by Zend and a huge wave of hype they managed to build within the last 10 weeks or so but I advise everyone not to fall for the hype until it's riped a bit. It's not nearly as mature or as well tested as Symfony or Cake and could use another year or two on the market before it has proven itself.

I'm curious, did you ever try Symfony or CakePHP? If so, I'd be interested in hearing what you liked or disliked about them compared both to Rails and to PHP development without a framework.

Rails is to Ruby as Symfony is to PHP. I've tried Symfony myself and real had a hard time getting my head around it, likewise I'd probably have the same problem with RoR only worse because I'm more attuned to PHP or Perl, I do find that by using the Smarty templateing engine and MDB2 Database API that what I'm working on has shrunk dramatically and is much easier to understand. There are several Perl equivalents on CPAN, that are probably more reliable and mature than the PEAR equivalents in PHP, I assume that the only reason they aren't used more is because embperl is more arcane to use than PHP.

Why is our only choice for PHP a Rails copycat some guy baked up in his spare time? Why not Symfony, an enterprise-ready PHP5 framework that you can develop just as rapidly with, yet has documentation, a support community and real-world usage behind it? You know, the framework that Yahoo! Bookmarks runs on.

As many have pointed out allready, PHP (incl. PHP 5) is a subset of CakePHP, as it is - Tadaa! - a PHP Framework. So if you run Cake on PHP 5 (it runs on both PHP 4 and PHP 5) then you've got both.
There are a lot of Frameworks recommended here, such as Django, Turbogears and others. They are all very neat. I'd like to add Zope (or it's superset Plone) to that list as it is the oldest and most mature of all these neat OSS Webkits.

Rails is the first project that emphatically applied marketing tactics to make itself popular, thus the extreme hype surrounding it and the potential critical mass it has gained. It's simular to the hype Zend is putting behind it's Zend Framework right now. Which is also way overhyped with bold claims despite being less than a year old. However Rails is *not* the Framework that invented or first implemented MVC, Scaffolding or all the other concepts associated with it.

A Webdevelopers 2 cents.

Feature, concept and technology wise Zope (built with Python) is still unmatched by any other Framework or Appserver available, be it in Python, Ruby, Java or whatever.

CakePHP is a good Framework - I'm using on PHP 5 it just now to build a larger custom CRM System - and the community is fun (no Forum - we all hang out on IRC) but I recommend Symfony, as it is built entirely on PHP 5 no extra work added for PHP 4 compliance, covers aspects of it job by integrating existing Projects such as Creole and Propel for the DB stuff and it has very good documentation. Including a very well written Book (free PDF version available). Symfony is mature and has been successfully used in very large scale Projects (Yahoo Bookmarks is built on it).

Bottom Line: I'd be carefull not to blindly follow the rabid hypers of Rails or their fresh PHP equivalent, the Zend Framework bandwagon crew. Check out the Frameworks people have mentioned here and if you want to stick to PHP 5 Cake or Symfony are both fine choices.

If you're mostly comparing frameworks anyway (CakePHP and RoR are frameworks, PHP5 is a language) just substitute symfony for PHP5, and the answer becomes clear: use symfony... The best of PHP5 with the best practices of RoR - just make sure to use an opcode cache because symfony is not the most light-weight.

Scalable, and loads of fun to program with.

have you considered symfony? I've done a few sites for customers using it and it's great!!

Zope. - What Rails wants to be when it grows up.

Also be sure to check out Plone, Symfony, Django, CakePHP, Prado and Turbogears before you blindly join the overhyped Rails bandwagon.

If this year was 2000 then I would agree with you. PHP has quite a few MVC frameworks that have been around for some time and are fairly extensively used in enterprise environments. If you know any developers embedding their PHP in the HTML in large apps please ask them to stop.

Here is a small example of a few MVCs out there.
CakePHP - http://www.cakephp.org/
Symfony - http://www.symfony-project.com/
Zend Framework - http://framework.zend.com/

Your way of thinking is outdated. There are many frameworks that facilitate proper MVC, templating, and a separation of duties. Check out CodeIgniter, CakePHP, and symfony, three of the most popular frameworks for PHP. Development techniques and approaches in PHP have changed significantly in the last few years.

Not to start a little argument over PHP and Python, but you're comparing apples with oranges here. You are saying that PHP is insecure, its semantics are undesirable and so are its standard libraries, database interfacing, interpreter and performance, and then you come along saying how awesome Django is, disregarding that actually you're comparing a language with a framework.

There are a handful of decent PHP frameworks out there, with others coming along, which you can take and compare with Django, but please don't bash the language because you don't like its semantics, you have something personal with it or you didn't take the time to choose a decent framework.

Regarding the database interfacing support, I beg to differ, I believe PHP has been supporting a large number of databases for a longer while than most of the other web scripting languages out there today.

That depends (of course). Ruby on Rails is very nice, but the Ruby language is very different from C#. PHP is much more similar.
If you decide to go with PHP, have a look at the Symfony project. It's a well-documented rails-like framework for PHP, it really promotes better coding practices.

We've gone through a similar experience when we grew from a team of 2 to a team of 8 in 3 months. Things we learned to be helpful in the way of tools:

- A Subversion repository for every project, and one repository per person, to host "private" projects. Also, TortoiseSVN for a windows shell integration with Subversion.

- Install Trac for every subversion project. Use it for writing documentation, and for following up on issues by posting Tickets. Tickets help a lot in maintaining the focus on problems and future developments. The integration with Subversion changesets and milestones is bliss.

- Install the appropriate modules for Trac for permission management, and allow your customers and testers to post tickets themselves. Eases up a LOT in the way of issue tracking and fixing bugs fast. It's a great way to have other people build your to-do list dynamically.

- Use frameworks for development. If you're programming with PHP use Symfony for real programming (and not just random code bits).

- Have a shared folder for files.

- Use an appropriate database backend and install common tools for database access (phpMyAdmin, pgpPgAdmin).

- Use the right tools for the job. As an example, remmember that MySQL works well as a fast database backend. But if you stick to MySQL for real applications where integrity and object mapping is relevant, you won't be doing real DB development unless you use views, functions and stored procedures. If you don't have these features, you'll never use them. If you use them, use PostgresSQL.

- Buy a billboard, a big one, and have a handy set of markers available. Do not underestimate the power of a billboard.

These are just things that worked and still work for us. There are plenty more things you can do, but first step is realizing the NEED for change, and getting everyone to work towards that.

Knock it off allready.
I've had enough of the eternal Dimwits constantly bashing this or that with "MySQL not scalable" "PHP not scalable", blablabla.
PHP has arrived in the enterprise market. That's a fact. Yes, I know, Java has been there for 8 years, PHP is messy and quirky (so is Perl), MySQL isn't a DB, we've heard it all before.
In case you haven't noticed: PHP 5 is out. It's a full blown, mature PL and arguably the 400 pound gorilla of SSI solutions with a long history. MySQL 5 is out aswell. It's a full blown DB and comes with tons of free x-platform admin and design tools that make building the outline of a large webapp a walk in the park and thus scares the living daylights out of Oracle and IBM. You may have noticed IBM virtually giving their DB2 away for free (beer) since just a few months ago. Guess how that happend.
Imagine someone would come along and tell you that large-scale webapps in Perl are a pipedream. Not to far-fetched in this context, no? And what about slashdot and kuro5hin?

PHP is as good a technology as any other in use when it comes to building large webapps (point in case: www.rubyonrails.org/index.php/ ). Industry strength PHP Frameworks are poping up left, right and center and other places like mushrooms after the rain. And as for MySQL "not being ready for large, scalable apps" - you're being silly.

Quit the hype allready. There are at least 3 oss web packages out there that are better in more than just a few aspects:
django ( http://www.djangoproject.com/ )
Symfony ( http://www.symfony-project.com/ )
Zope ( http://www.zope.org/ )
Zope is by far the oldest and most sophisticated. Django is Rails done right and in Python and Symfony is a PHP metaframework that includes Propel and some other third party goodies with tons of very neat PHP 5 foundation work. Each one of these kick Rails up and down the street when it comes to ease of use, ease of deployment, available documentation and performance (Zope may be a little slower, but they have a full-blownobject relational DB built in that makes SQL look like peek and poking a c64 back in 1985).
And since the Ruby on Rails people use PHP to power their Rails website (oh, the irony; http://rubyonrails.org/index.php ) I'd trust in even PHP being able to perform more than good in the newest lineup of Frameworks.

So quit the rails-only hype allready, it's anoying.

I would love to get away from PHP and use more Python, Ruby, Perl, what have you except all the cheap hosting solutions have the canonical shared Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP setup and not much else. OTOH, if I had to setup something on a dedicated server I'd probably go with Django.
Not that I hate PHP. It's just the horrible PHP code you find all too often. Hopefully frameworks like Symfony will change that.

Anyone who is looking for a PHP port of Ruby on Rails has to take a look at Symfony.

Based on the best practices of web development, thoroughly tried on several active websites, symfony aims to speed up the creation and maintenance of web applications, and to replace the repetitive coding tasks by power, control and pleasure.

If you have been looking for a Rails/Django-like framework for PHP projects with features such as:

* simple templating and helpers
* cache management
* multiple environments support
* deployment management
* scaffolding
* smart URLs
* multilingual and I18N support
* object model and MVC separation
* Ajax support