PHP frameworks assist in the development of web applications by providing a tested and cohesive infrastructure implementing commonly required functionality. This allows the developer to leverage tested code, solutions, expertise and documentation from a wider community. The end result is that the development team can focus on the application domain.
Frameworks
Yii
Yii is a high-performance PHP framework best for developing Web 2.0 applications.
Yii comes with rich features: MVC, DAO/ActiveRecord, I18N/L10N, caching, authentication and role-based access control, scaffolding, testing, etc. It can reduce your development time significantly.
Zend Framework
Extending the art & spirit of PHP, Zend Framework is based on simplicity, object-oriented best practices, corporate friendly licensing, and a rigorously tested agile codebase. Zend Framework is focused on building more secure, reliable, and modern Web 2.0 applications & web services, and consuming widely available APIs from leading vendors like Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, Flickr, as well as API providers and cataloguers like StrikeIron and ProgrammableWeb.
CakePHP
CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications. Using commonly known design patterns like MVC and ORM within the convention over configuration paradigm, CakePHP reduces development costs and helps developers write less code.
Kohana
Kohana is an elegant HMVC PHP5 framework that provides a rich set of components for building web applications.
It requires very little configuration, fully supports UTF-8 and i18n, and provides many of the tools that a developer needs within a highly flexible system. The integrated class auto-loading, cascading filesystem, highly consistent API, and easy integration with vendor libraries make it viable for any project, large or small.
symfony
Symfony is a full-stack framework, a library of cohesive classes written in PHP.
It provides an architecture, components and tools for developers to build complex web applications faster. Choosing symfony allows you to release your applications earlier, host and scale them without problem, and maintain them over time with no surprise.
Symfony is based on experience. It does not reinvent the wheel: it uses most of the best practices of web development and integrates some great third-party libraries.
Solar
Solar is a PHP 5 framework for web application development. It is fully name-spaced and uses enterprise application design patterns, with built-in support for localization and configuration at all levels.
CodeIgniter
CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications. If you’re a developer who lives in the real world of shared hosting accounts and clients with deadlines, and if you’re tired of ponderously large and thoroughly undocumented frameworks
Seagull
Seagull is a mature OOP framework for building web, command line and GUI applications. Licensed under BSD, the project allows PHP developers to easily integrate and manage code resources, and build complex applications quickly.
PHP on Trax
Php On Trax (formerly Php On Rails) is a web-application and persistance framework that is based on Ruby on Rails and includes everything needed to create database-backed web-applications according to the Model-View-Control pattern of separation.