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I'm an advanced designer, but also starting out a career in development: I'm a PHP intermediate user. I (unfortunately) learnt procedural development, and not OOP.

My current project is a multi-user game web-app and I was developing procedurally only for my Boss to insist that it has to be OOP, so I needed to start learning OOP (I believe I am a relatively fast learner). A friend advised me to just learn a lightweight PHP framework and move on from there, since the project must be launched in less than three weeks (I have roughly 2 weeks left now)!

After viewing a lot of articles comparing them, I ended up with CodeIgniter, Kohana, and Yii based on the efficiency and the lightweight-edness. I am not quite used to command-line instructions like it's done in Yii, so I had to drop it off to save my time :(. Kohana looks very interesting, but I am new to the PHP5 and OOP it uses and there's VERY LITTLE help on Kohana, I even tried to buy books but there are none. CodeIgniter has a lot of helpful material, but it has no official Authentication module with Access Control, and the three open-source modules I have tested did not integrate well with other modules I am using.

Please can anyone recommend another OOP PHP framework with a quick learning curve, or provide some pointers to resolve the problems I had with those 3 frameworks tested, or should I just develop the entire application out of the box after studying OOP extensively? Thanks for your time.

Charles
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PHP OOP Newbie
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    PHP for something that sounds like a MMORPG? Impossible deadlines? The main developer with no php or OOP experience? argh – Andreas Bonini Dec 19 '09 at 19:06
  • @Koper: No, its not like MMORPG, it just has to do with using forms and fetching simple data from a MySQL database to compare each user's game-play with expected data in the DB. You can relate that to an multichoice online examination or something. What do you suggest, please? – PHP OOP Newbie Dec 19 '09 at 19:11
  • oh, i misunderstood then, sorry! – Andreas Bonini Dec 19 '09 at 19:19
  • If you are already using other modules, then you should give a hint of what type of code they are. You ask for a lightweight framework, which would mean a framework with few classes / functions (but still have ACL classes). If the framework must be useful, then it should have the necessary functions / classes; the more functions / classes the framework has, the less code you need to write (in an ideal world). – apaderno Dec 19 '09 at 19:49
  • Good luck doing HP/MP refresh intervals in PHP :) – NiCk Newman Jul 27 '15 at 12:31

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There are frameworks, that provide an authentication natively but there is no way, that you can learn those in two weeks AND finish your project.

CodeIgniter was the first framework I learned and it was the perfect choice for me: The documentation is really good: reading the documentation enabled me to fully understand the MVC pattern. If I was in your position I would definitely use codeigniter and integrate one of the many free authentication plugins discussed here.

After you finished your project, you can go on and start learning symfony and Zend Framework, depending on your preferences.

Community
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FlorianH
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  • Thank you very much, I am checking out those 3rd party modules right now. About CodeIgniter, do you think I can learn it with no knowledge of OOP, or I need to study PHP 5 (OOP) first of all? – PHP OOP Newbie Dec 19 '09 at 20:21
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    I think you can dive right into the codeigniter documentation. Codeigniter is not very "religious" about OOP: It uses it, where it makes good sense (with models for example) and describes what it does in the documentation. As far as I know, it does not use "advanced" PHP5 concepts (like reflection) so you do not have to understand them in order to use codeigniter. – FlorianH Dec 19 '09 at 20:57