Why Zend Framework (over framework X)?

Magento is a steaming shitfest, and has been for some time.

> Try and attend a PHP developers conference where there isn't a discussion on ZF

I've never been to a single conference where anyone spoke on the merits of ZF.

> ...try and find a jobs board that doesn't mention a requirement of ZF on the first page.

I've worked with and at ~30 companies in the last 5 years. Of those, the only ones that used and ZF libraries did so because that was the only way to get certain third party integrations (PayPal, for example) or because they didn't know better options existed.

> Zend Framework was one of the first major frameworks to embrace PHP 5.3

This is an out-and-out lie.

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The Symfony guys are good. When you're in a room of PHP devs, chances are most of them are WordPress jockeys. When you're in a room with PHP devs that use Symfony, chances are they know Ruby or Python or Perl or C, but use PHP because that's what clients like to deploy on, and they use Symfony because it gets the job done.

It seems that you think some statements in his post are wrong, or biased, which is find, but your answer just looks like a child rant.

Clearly, it wasn't for the "merits" of the framework. I switched because of the merits of the communit surrounding it and decided I wanted to hitch my horse to those that consider architecture, conventions and quality as important as I do.

To me, it's less about which framework you're using but the community, ecosystem or whatever that comes with it. PHP generally sucks for this, as most PHP groups all got their start via WorPress. Symfony's community seems to cater to an entirely different audience than ZF has historically.