I highly recommend Kohana PHP. I don't personally recommend CakePHP given my own experiences with it and some inefficiencies I think it has.

There are a lot of php frameworks out there but a few that have become popular besides CakePHP and Kohana are The Zend Framework, CodeIgnitor (Kohana was initially a fork of this), and Symfony. All of them have their pros and cons. I have developed applications with both CakePHP and CodeIgnitor and liked working with them. At the moment I am liking the latest release of CakePHP, 1.2, but I am looking at Kohana for other projects. I would say look at the different ones and see which one you like working with the most. They all basically do the same thing and if it doesn't have a certain ability there probably is a module for it. I find if you like and are comfortable coding with either a language, like php, or even a certain framework you end up ahead in the end instead of just using something because someone says it's better because...insert reason here. Hope this helps.

Thanks guys!

Do you have a rough spec of the kind of thing you want to do and what your dev style is? I recently did an analysis of like 10 different php frameworks so I have a handle on some of the differences.

I want to make an application that keeps track of homework assignments. I've looked for a bunch of site that do such a thing and haven't been satisfied. It's sort of a toss up between Soshiku and Remember the Milk. I'm really not much of a developer, but this lack of a good web service has pushed me into that realm. I'm not really sure what I would need the framework to do really, but I want something light-weight and fast that can handle basic data storage tasks.

What is your level of development and your willingness to learn? Frameworks are really for programmers. They are designed to do the redundant tasks associated in writing software so you don't need to do those every time. They go a step beyond a library because they, also, contain an architecture. But, they are for coders.

If you are willing to learn there is a lot you can do there. But, you would need to learn some coding to use them.

If you don't want to learn to code I would suggest drupal with views, cck, and some of their related modules (like view bulk actions). You may be able to achieve what you want with little to no coding.

I know how to program. I haven't done serious programming in a while but I'm willing to spend as much time as I need to. I know that I have the ability to learn a framework. I know PHP, though admittedly not exhaustively. But before I start learning the specifics of a framework (which is what I want for the level of specificity that I desire) I wanted some suggestions for what people like the most.

I like how CakePHP has a lot of Helper and Component Classes for creating forms and sending email, etc. This is what I'm looking for.

I'd been one to always say that PHP doesn't need a framework, but I've been using my first framework, Kohana, and I think it is very nice. MVC takes some getting used to, and I might not be using it properly, but I've tried my best, and so far so good.

I looked at CodeIgniter, but its support of php4 made me reluctant to use it, because it was my thinking that there would be some loss of efficiency.