Popular PHP Frameworks

There are so many open source frameworks available for PHP, providing almost limitless options for developers. One of the important things developers are looking for is a solid fan base and community support when choosing a framework to work with: this saves time when troubleshooting as there is more documentation to draw from.

In less popular PHP framework the only technical expert is often the author, who may not provide documentation or spend time answering framework-related questions. This makes support for less popular framework slow, and this can clearly affect the user in a negative way if they are actively using the framework in their website development.

We have compiled the 7 Most Popular PHP Frameworks in 2011 via Google keyword statistics.

The keyword tool illustrates the amount of searched for the particular PHP framework in a one-month timeframe worldwide. We have concluded that the higher the search volume for these phrases, the more popular the PHP framework must be.

Zend framework clearly ranks the most popular sitting at around 74% of PHP Framework searches worldwide. We believe it is popular due to:

- the creators, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski are founders of PHP3

- Zend is the oldest and most commonplace Framework for PHP

- Magento, one of the most popular eCommerce platforms, is based on Zend

- McAffee and IBM websites were built using Zend

The next most popular is CodeIgniter. Compared to the Zend framework, CodeIgniter’s community and popularity is quite small. Via Google Trends, we can see an evolving pattern of popularity among the Frameworks represented in the following chart:

Google Trends use approximations; however you can deduce the following:

1.) Zend framework popularity starting from year 2007 has been consistent

2.) Codeigniter popularity is increasing

3.) The fastest-rising PHP framework is Yii (red color)

4.) Kohana popularity is somewhat flat