Best PHP Framework with a great future?

Can someone suggest me the best PHP Framework to make an advanced news website with user levels etc.
I think I need to choose between Symfony and Laravel.
I am asking because I have read a lot of comments “codeigniter or cakephp are a dead project”.
And I don’t think it is good idea to spend a lot of time and get familiar with a framework and then after 2 years you don’t get any more updates.
So which of them you think it has more future Symfony/Laravel or any other?

Largely I think the difference is preference between those two. You can start a bit of a war with that question and people have convincing arguments for both sides (just Google it and read some articles or forums questions on the subject).

My personal preference is Laravel due to more familiarity with it. Random chance, the first time I needed a framework I chose between them and dabbled in CI, then moved to Laravel, and didn’t look back. I know it’s under active development. The new version is being released. The main developer is now 100% on Laravel I believe, and not in its sibling company/project/whatever it was so that bodes well for Laravel’s immediate future anyway. I think it’s an excellent way to learn MVC if you don’t know it, and a good platform.

However, I think both platforms are actively developed, both platforms enable the learning of MVC rather well, and both platforms are good, well rounded platforms that you can find many developers for :wink:

Maybe someone who is more familiar with both (I’ve not really used Symfony and I’m not a master of Laravel) can give you a better idea of pros/cons of each comparatively, but I think most of what you’ll get here with this type of question are opinions, or opinions held as facts :wink:

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Symfony has Drupal 8 under its wing, and an astonishing amount of site work can be done with that without coding a line. My only real problem with Symfony is how the Dependency Injection container works - I’d prefer it if it would use the PHP Reflection API rather than build a sometimes huge PHP object to call out all the files.

Symfony has Drupal 8 under its wing

Yeah, if OP is looking for a CMS that’s an undeniable benefit. If not, less so.

That may bring up a good point - is there a reason that you’re specifically looking at a straight PHP framework and not a CMS such as Drupal? (Or Wordpress or Joomla or w/e).

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Ditto what @jeffreylees said, except my preference is Symfony. :smile:

Laravel is convention over configuration. Symfony is configuration over convention.
(My opinion) I prefer configuration over convention. You could always define a configuration that sets a de facto convention. But if there’s a convention baked into the framework, then you’re stuck with it.

Laravel uses ActiveRecord. Symfony uses DataMapper.
(My opinion) I think DataMapper is better. It allows your domain model to be decoupled from the persistence layer.

Both have a IoC/DI/Service container, but Laravel still has singletons and statics.

Laravel has been known to frequently break backward compatibility, sometimes even in bugfix releases. Symfony puts a lot of effort into maintaining backward compatibility, and they offer long term support releases.

Symfony has a larger number of engineers actively developing and maintaining it.

And more subjectively, when I peek under Symfony’s hood, I’m likely to be impressed. When I peek under Laravel’s hood, I’m likely to cringe – such as, for example, global variables that span not just multiple files, but multiple git repos.

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Pssh you have a more eloquent response than me :wink:

Drupal sadly still has it’s singletons, but that may be a backward compatibility throwback - insofar as Drupal is ever backward compatible with itself. And it still has its globals, but reading from the comments in the repo they wanted to remove a lot of this stuff but felt it was too much too soon for the module dev community. They are already getting forked for changing over to OOP - see Backdrop. Now there’s a CMS/Framework that I don’t see having much of a future, but I’ve been wrong before.

Everyone is saying that CodeIgniter is dead, don’t say like that anymore, it is not dead… Codeigniter is a boon for the developers, who want to dip into the Framework and MVC. And CakePHP is also not dead, actually it’s more active now than in many other years.
And if you need to choose between Symfony and Laravel, Then Laravel is awesome. Laravel is lean to learn, because it has more high quality resources to learn, it is more powerful, flexible to use. Once you start with this Laravel, I am pretty sure that you can use it without any problem.

Frameworks that use *mostly proprietary code will die and be replaced with more modular solutions like Laravel. So yes CI is on it’s way to grave unelss there is a change.

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