The first PHP framework I got to grips with was Symfony, for a project I was working on at the time and it probably took a weekend to be able to start getting some stuff together. One weekend and I was generating models and scaffolding the user screens, hugely rewarding! To write all that code myself would have taken a good while indeed.

Documentation is king though, I have been using the Zend Framework lately and while it is very good and definately has some benefits over Symfony, the documentation is just not quite there yet which makes it a little frustrating at times.

While I agree with this, I find its even more rewarding to _easily_ integrate other frameworks into yours to do the job. I LOVE being able to browse SOLAR and Zend apis for a feature I really dont want to implement. After a quick svn:externals into my lib directory, all that functionality is ready to go, instantly.

Its important that the framework can expose itself at a lower level as “just” a loosely coupled collection of classes. Atop of that, it should add the magic sauce classes that lets you write my-first-crappy-blog application in precisely 8.5, 14.65 or 60.7 lines of code, depending on how much you like the sauce. The issue is that once the magic starts seeping below, you get classes riddled with singletons, “configuration managers” and other nonsense, to the point where you have to pull the whole framework into the application to get anything working.

Im fond of SOLAR and Zend in this regard; Many things they offer may not be applicable to my particular project, but the stuff that is can be easily leveraged.

You said, “The biggest PITA of any framework, no matter how well-written, is getting up to speed and becoming productive.” That is exactly what I’m getting at when I say above, “Learning someone else’s code is much less rewarding in the short term than writing your own code.” Thank you for helping to illustrate my case. :-)