I have been using PHP for nearly 10 years but my growth within the language stalled a while back. I could try to blame it on lack of challenges but really it’s been a lack of drive. Even if I had projects that I could have used to learn more about the language, I think I would have stuck to old programming habits because thats what I was familiar with. Lately at my day job, my projects have started to get more and more complex and I am quickly realizing that I need to grow in PHP and in my programming style.

About a year ago I started looking into PHP frameworks as well as the MCV structure for applications. At first I looked at CakePHP, then CodeIgnighter. I also found Kohana and Zend. I tried my hand at CodeIgnighter for a project or two but I really couldn’t get into it. I naturally went right to Kohana (It was forked from CI’s source but was built for PHP5). I ran into the same issues, I could get the framework up, build a sample project but it really didn’t excite me. At that point I stopped trying to work with frameworks and really focused on the language.

I learned about PDO, I started building classes, and I really focused on better programming with out the help of a framework. So fast forward to last month. I started to revisit PHP frameworks again. After looking at the current states of the frameworks I really feel that Zend will work best for me. I think the reason I could not get into the flow with the other frameworks was that I was jumping in head first into both a framework and MCV. Zend is the only one of the frameworks that allows you to work with it and not force your apps to be in the MVC structure. I have started working with Zend 1.11 but I am using it without MVC. I am really liking it so far and once I get more familiar with the framework I will jump into MVC.

If you want to follow along in my journey, you can start with these Zend resources:

• Download the Zend Framework
• Zend Framework Webinars
• Zend videos on Youtube

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