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Choosing PHP web framework for intranet

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leontius
I need to develop an intranet for a certain community in PHP, but I am a bit at a loss on choosing the right web framework for the job. Can someone help me decide which framework suits my needs best? I am pondering on symfony, cakephp, codeigniter, and kohana, but any other suggestions are always welcome.

The intranet has the following characteristics:
* Programmers come and go every year, so the code must be readable and easy to grasp (this is the most important factor). Also, they have varying skill level so the less concept to learn the better.
* It manages around 500 users only so performance should not be a problem.
* All the users have uniform fast broadband internet access (we're all in the same building anyway) so page size (HTML, CSS, Javascript size) is not a problem at all.
* The website will be served over IIS (Microsoft server).
* It must support authentication by LDAP (I haven't looked into this, but I suppose there are some plugins I can use regardless of which platform I use).
rvec
symphony isn't easy to learn
cakephp is ugly
codeigniter is easy to learn, has a great documentation and is a good framework
kohana started as a fork of codeigniter but is now a better designed framework and a lighter framework, only downside is the documentation (is minimal), which makes learning it a bit harder.

So I'd say codeigniter if you want to make it easy for the other programmers, and kohana if you want to have a faster application.

Also I wouldn't recommend IIS for PHP, but that's your choice.

And you could also use an application as your framework. I don't know what the intranet is going to be, but if it includes a forum you could start with phpBB3, if it includes a news-page you could start with Drupal.

I just wouldn't start with any really light application like wordpress, because the framework isn't probably as easy to extend.
leontius
Thanks for the input rvec!

The intranet is used for managing specific stuff (ie. managing members of activities across academic years -- it's quite complicated) so I don't think I would start with such a complex system as phpBB or Drupal. (I'm quite experienced in drupal and I don't see it easy and flexible enough for creating applications from scratch.)

I'm a bit skeptical about kohana and codeigniter -- how can they manage their users if they can't manage theirselves? It is uncertain which fork will prevail (and I cannot afford choosing the wrong one). I really hope they will merge again someday. That being said, one of my friend had a good experience with kohana so I would choose that over codeigniter if I have to.

The server is not under my jurisdiction so it's unavoidable to use IIS.

Any other points of view?
rvec
Quote:
The intranet is used for managing specific stuff (ie. managing members of activities across academic years -- it's quite complicated) so I don't think I would start with such a complex system as phpBB or Drupal. (I'm quite experienced in drupal and I don't see it easy and flexible enough for creating applications from scratch.)

Drupal is quite flexible. Take a look at some of these sites for example.
http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites
If you need content management and (one or more) communities drupal would be a good choice.
Quote:

I'm a bit skeptical about kohana and codeigniter -- how can they manage their users if they can't manage theirselves? It is uncertain which fork will prevail (and I cannot afford choosing the wrong one). I really hope they will merge again someday. That being said, one of my friend had a good experience with kohana so I would choose that over codeigniter if I have to.

I don't think they'll ever merge, and it would be a shame if they did. They both have their own advantages and have gone their own paths. The two have been separated for so long now, you can't even call it a fork any more. They are just two separate frameworks.
leontius
rvec wrote:
Quote:
The intranet is used for managing specific stuff (ie. managing members of activities across academic years -- it's quite complicated) so I don't think I would start with such a complex system as phpBB or Drupal. (I'm quite experienced in drupal and I don't see it easy and flexible enough for creating applications from scratch.)

Drupal is quite flexible. Take a look at some of these sites for example.
http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites
If you need content management and (one or more) communities drupal would be a good choice.


I'm not quite comfortable with the idea that everything is a node (at least for this particular project). Also, learning the drupal platform (ie. coding new modules, not using existing ones) might be a big burden for beginners. I haven't had sufficient experience with other frameworks to tell how hard it is though, but I suppose other frameworks are more simple...
Clarke
rvec wrote:
symphony isn't easy to learn
cakephp is ugly
codeigniter is easy to learn, has a great documentation and is a good framework
kohana started as a fork of codeigniter but is now a better designed framework and a lighter framework, only downside is the documentation (is minimal), which makes learning it a bit harder.

So I'd say codeigniter if you want to make it easy for the other programmers, and kohana if you want to have a faster application.

Also I wouldn't recommend IIS for PHP, but that's your choice.

And you could also use an application as your framework. I don't know what the intranet is going to be, but if it includes a forum you could start with phpBB3, if it includes a news-page you could start with Drupal.

I just wouldn't start with any really light application like wordpress, because the framework isn't probably as easy to extend.


I can't help but note the substantial bias exhibited in your posts here, Rvec. Whilst I wholeheartedly agree that CakePHP is (at least, on a code level) an ugly framework, Symfony definitely is certainly not too substantially more difficult to learn than CI or Kohana (although, saying that, they are great frameworks to work on Smile) Of course, I may be wrong, but I'm certainly open to your swaying my opinion! Smile

I think more importantly that if this is going to be authored by multiple people, Symfony could be a better choice. I state this for numerous reasons, not the least of being that Symfony enforces a degree of stardardization upon its authors (in terms of making sure that people code things in the same way; making things substantially more readable across the board). Generally that would be a double-edged sword, as it would restrict the coding styles to that of the framework (unlike CI), which would possibly mean you can't code in the way you want and must code in the way the framework wants. However! This is advantageous in this situation as if there will be multiple developers everything is similar enough to provide simple reference and in general make the code more community-friendly. Another possible benefit would be sfGuardPlugin's support for LDAP authentication -- which I believe would be a significant boon to you Smile
leontius
Clarke wrote:
rvec wrote:
symphony isn't easy to learn
cakephp is ugly
codeigniter is easy to learn, has a great documentation and is a good framework
kohana started as a fork of codeigniter but is now a better designed framework and a lighter framework, only downside is the documentation (is minimal), which makes learning it a bit harder.

So I'd say codeigniter if you want to make it easy for the other programmers, and kohana if you want to have a faster application.

Also I wouldn't recommend IIS for PHP, but that's your choice.

And you could also use an application as your framework. I don't know what the intranet is going to be, but if it includes a forum you could start with phpBB3, if it includes a news-page you could start with Drupal.

I just wouldn't start with any really light application like wordpress, because the framework isn't probably as easy to extend.


I can't help but note the substantial bias exhibited in your posts here, Rvec. Whilst I wholeheartedly agree that CakePHP is (at least, on a code level) an ugly framework, Symfony definitely is certainly not too substantially more difficult to learn than CI or Kohana (although, saying that, they are great frameworks to work on Smile) Of course, I may be wrong, but I'm certainly open to your swaying my opinion! Smile

I think more importantly that if this is going to be authored by multiple people, Symfony could be a better choice. I state this for numerous reasons, not the least of being that Symfony enforces a degree of stardardization upon its authors (in terms of making sure that people code things in the same way; making things substantially more readable across the board). Generally that would be a double-edged sword, as it would restrict the coding styles to that of the framework (unlike CI), which would possibly mean you can't code in the way you want and must code in the way the framework wants. However! This is advantageous in this situation as if there will be multiple developers everything is similar enough to provide simple reference and in general make the code more community-friendly. Another possible benefit would be sfGuardPlugin's support for LDAP authentication -- which I believe would be a significant boon to you Smile


Thanks Clarke, this will certainly be my consideration. It's true that standardization will tend to sacrifice flexibility, but a good project will always have some standard way of doing things anyway, so it might not even be an issue. The problem is that whether that standard is common-sense enough and easy enough to learn.
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