Symfony framework

is the Symfony framework any good?

It’s got quite a following.... but I wouldn’t recommend it as a first framework. I found it difficult to use the numerous YAML files. If it’s your first trip to the land of frameworks, I’d recommend CodeIgniter: it’s clean and doesn’t do any magical things behind your back that take forever and a day to figure out. It also doesn’t have a big model layer. That’s important, because big model layers can confuse the @#%^ out of you when you first start looking at frameworks.

CodeIgniter looks interesting

Whoops: I meant to say that CodeIgniter does NOT do anything behind your back. I updated my reply. CodeIgniter has much better documentation...

symfony is very complicated but is supported by a very complete documentation to facilitate the development

nobody wants things to be complicated. People what to make things simple and build apps faster

Wow. When I looked at Symfony, its documentation was mediocre at best. I found it very difficult to complete simple tasks, which caused me to move to CodeIgniter. I’m sure my experience of it now would be different now that I know a lot more about frameworks. When I used Symfony, it had a number of good features, but documentation was not one of them.

Codeigniter is the fastest between symphony and CakePhp.
Easy to install, easy to code and very flexible.

Here is another framework to throw into the mix

http://www.yiiframework.com/

and you are forgetting Kohana...