Fuelphp is a relatively new framework that claims to be based on the best ideas of other frameworks with a fresh start. I decided to rewrite my blog from scratch with fuelphp (it was on drupal). Why did I choose Fuelphp?
- First of all the philosophy. Configuration over convention means easier learing curve and more flexibility. Its what made me love Codeigniter.
- Its lightweight! I hate heavy stuff that I feel I have no control of. Fuel has a minimalistic and clear architecture based on php 5.3 (namespaces FTW).
- The documentation is awesome. Not that rich yet but I love the structure. Makes my life so easy. It's really very important when learning a new framework to easily navigate through the documentation.
- The people behind the framework are very experienced and I already like their past work. It feels like they have combined their experience until now to make the best framework for them and at the same time have a goal to make fuel a community driven framework. Community is currently small but I think that it is a matter of time to grow up.
- The (H)MVC pattern is great for large application and makes DRY easier.
- You do everything with classes and again the are no conventions, just a proposed way of organizing code. You don't have for example to have models in the models' folder. You just do what you like.
- There are no application specific Classes. That's great because no time is wasted on non essential stuff.
- Other things I really like are the ORM
(ported from Kohana)and OIL, a command line utility. There are a lot more in this young framework and I'm looking forward to dive even more into it.
For those who have experience working with Codeigniter or Kohana, they will find many similarities and a lot of stuff will look familiar. Though, after working for a week with Fuel, Codeigniter feels so old :(
There are some stuff that I'd want to be different, like the way Asset class is working. But not anything serious.
Make sure you ll check out Fuel, it really rocks.
Update: The query builder is ported from Kohana, not the ORM tweet