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Choosing the best PHP framework can sometimes be difficult. There are many questions you need to ask yourself before you jump in and start building a site.

One of the first things you should look at is whether or not the PHP framework actually has room for expansion. While it might not suit your situation at the moment, what happens if your company expands, or if you need extra functionality from your site?

You should always be planning for the future. The more modular a PHP framework, the better it’s going to suit you down the road.

One of the other items you should look at is how easy it to switch to that PHP framework? Are the coding styles between it and your current site similar? It can be very hard to simply change around things such as the way you do your “foreach” or “if else” statements - just try to keep everything similar between the main framework and your custom code.

Lots of the time many frameworks will actually have a certain coding style that they like to follow, especially if you plan on selling your custom modules back into their systems.

Now the other thing you should look at is their folder structure - as programmers we often have our own specific style, and with frameworks we kind of need to stick to what the framework coders have actually put into place.

One of the next items we should look is support – is there a highly built community around this? Are there a lot of other developers that can help us if we run into issues? Does the company offer anything such as one-on-one support? Will they also do paid customizations for us? These are all things we should ask before we start purchasing a PHP framework.

Finally, one of the last things I want to touch on are the modules that the system might have – as we discussed, it’s best if the PHP framework has modularity to it. Now, some of the things we want to look at are that we want to see – are there any current modules that we can use to save ourselves trouble down the road and that aren’t reinventing the wheel? If there aren’t any modules that suit us right now, can they be easily programmed by other programmers, by ourselves, or by the company itself?

If you have any other questions about choosing the best PHP framework, please feel free to contact us and we’d be more than happy to work with you.