> All general purpose PHP frameworks suck!
> – Rasmus Lerdorf
Rasmus said this an awfully long time ago - 2013 or earlier?
Truth of the statement (then or now) aside, Rasmus was a C programmer long before he was a PHP programmer, which presumably strongly informed this position.
1. Maintenance: We support a mostly successful ecommerce application that was launched on CakePHP2 in 2012. These guys, like many of our clients (and yours too!) are stingy and while we've worked consistently on the site since then, upgrading to a newer version of CakePHP is a non-starter (Cake 3 was a total rewrite). As you may know, PHP in 2012 was a different world and we're stuck in it. I've just found out that CodeIgniter 4 is also a total rewrite. Sure CodeIgniter 3 is still supported, but for how long?
2. Deployment/Dev environment: It's possible that we just weren't doing it properly, but I have a large non-framework PHP cli app and several Go/Angular apps that move seamlessly between dev, staging, and production with very little human intervention. It always seemed more complicated with PHP frameworks.
3. Too much stuff: Basically the same argument as the article makes: Why should I use Cake\Network\Http\Client when I could just use Guzzle? Why does this ORM produce 30 unnecessary queries per request? Why in God's name would I use this "Helper" class to generate a <p> when I could just write HTML?
4. It's slow: As always, slow is a relative term, and PHP frameworks are relatively slow. Because there's too much stuff mostly.
The maintenance point is the most critical. Most of these frameworks last ~5 years between total rewrites. I'm sure there are exceptions. Laravel seems to have risen to the top, and might not have this problem. If you expect your application to have a lifetime of less than 5 years, then maybe it's OK. 5 years seems like a long time when you're just getting started. Ten years later...
I last used PHP a decade or so ago, and heavily relied on CodeIgniter framework. They had a good, tight feature set, and a fantastic community.
The fact it's now mostly gone kind of speaks to your point, though it may just be that PHP's marketshare overall has dropped so much that there really isn't sufficient energy to keep more than a couple of frameworks alive.
Well, the comments are (blissfully) in ISO 8601 format, but the article, the URL, the headline, etc are above any kind of chronological temporality.
The author does mention 'last October' ... as though that only happens once every hundred years.
it would have been very difficult for him to have been a PHP programmer before being C programmer, since he invented PHP by writing it in C, which is why most PHP functions are almost exact syntax as C
ftfy