If you are looking to learn more about the Symfony PHP framework, you can gain confidence watching a real pro slug through a few projects and pick up a lot of great, helpful tips along the way while chuckling at the real English he pervasively sprinkles with entertaining British anecdotes and self-outrage. Chris, you’re really hard on yourself, and you are by no means a NOOB! 🙂
I finally made it over the Symfony hump and must admit that I wish I learned a PHP framework much sooner. If you’re on the fence, learn one, trust me, it will be well worth your time. If you’re stubbornly refusing to look into a PHP framework, the era of “cowboy coding” is over, you will be irrelevant in about 3 years unless you adapt. Perhaps you should consider learning COBOL and specialize in migrating their COBOL code to web-based and bring them into 2003. At least they’ll be in the same millennium!
http://mossco.co.uk/symfony-2/free-symfony-2-tutorial-videos/
Why use a PHP framework?
If you use jQuery, Prototype or Angular to speed up your Javascript development, PHPMyAdmin or MySQL Workbench to speed up database design and development, you are already using tools and frameworks to support your web development process. These are tools probably already in your tool kit which help you accelerate development time by freeing you up to focus on writing more effective, better designed, and more intuitive code without worrying about the tools you need to accomplish those tasks. Often, we need to use the same tools on other projects, and this interchangeability of the tools in frameworks is where you will achieve compounding returns each time you use it. There’s a familiarity and understanding, a common ground everyone in your development team will start from.
You will find when you delve deeper into these frameworks that they save you a lot of time so the quality of your code and what it can do is better thought out, structured, ready for re-use, and the results will be exponentially better. Learning a PHP framework is an investment to better collaborative development environments and smoother sailing for any company who depends on a website.
Future proof your web assets
Another big reason to consider moving your web department to a framework is future compatibility. As your company grows its web assets, you may expand and find yourself in need of another web developer. The younger developers may only understand and be effective through a framework. Sure, the more experienced who don’t use frameworks may argue that they have written a few pseudo PHP frameworks in the past, but those libraries and tools they made were custom built. Without standardization and a common experience and understanding, unlike many developers share with the real frameworks like Symfony, Zend, CakePHP, Laravel, CodeIgnitor, or Yii to name a few, your company will not gain the benefits these PHP frameworks inherently provide. It’s compounding returns and with the exception of Zend, moving to a PHP framework will cost you only in time, but the trade off for the future will put you in a much stronger position with much stabler websites and code that will be written that will not only last longer, but be much more useful and effective to your company. That means more profits with compounding returns and less waste, a pretty good combination, don’t you think?
