http://www.phptherightway.com https://phpbestpractices.org
Also, I would encourage them to look at different frameworks, not just one. It'll help if they later move onto other languages, as they'll be already exposed to different ways of doing things :)
I only ask as scanning it I see that it recommends IIS7 for production PHP on windows servers. Which I believe you could only get using an unpatched windows 2008 server?
"LAST UPDATED: 2015-11-16 16:19:03 +0000" (right below their banner at the top)
If you need to run your production system on Windows then IIS7 will give you the most stable and best performance.
So it seems to be recommending IIS7 specifically, IIS 7.5, IIS 8 and IIS 8.5 have come out since then. So it is a bit like saying you should run this software on windows vista for best performance. IIS7 is old software.
I guess I'm asking, have the IIS team given up on PHP performance or is this recommendation really out of date.
The only pain point can be when there's a new release of PHP and you have customers who want to access MS SQL databases. This is done via Microsoft's own drivers [0] (Windows only). It's not been unknown for these driver releases to lag a bit behind PHP releases, but that said I see they're on the ball now with support for 5.6.
Other than that PHP runs just as quick and as reliably on Windows as it does on our Linux shared environments (I look after both).
[0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=200...