Nex thing is ZF it is a framework to use in your project, not a ready to go product which can produce blog in 10 minutes. It is more component library.

Many of these issues will eventually be resolved, but the biggest and perhaps most frustrating is the namespacing - I don’t see how this can be fixed/changed without breaking functionality for a lot of people who already use it.

Cudos to Will for follow all these posts, I think it demostrates his commitment to the ZF.

The documentation is often outdated, sometimes inaccurate (might be typo) and most importantly, very difficult to find specific information. The funny thing is, often than not I still need to rely on Google or some other external sources to find necessary information.

Couldn’t agree more.

I think it is silly to call the current Zend Framework version 1.5. I mean, come on, where are the basic features such as a pagination?

Again, couldn’t agree more.

Zend framework is still my framework of choice, though, i’ve never used or tested any other framework. It looks the part, but if documentation continues to be bad it will reflect of the framework itself.

@Eran: Thanks for sharing your comments with us! I agree with most of your experience except for the mention of the DB abstraction class. Although that could be my own problem. :)

@Steve: Thanks for sharing your opinion too, I appreciate it. And it’s good to see comments from different perspective. Although, how you believe a paginator is a gimmick is beyond me. ;)

Equally, since when was a paginator an essential part of a framework? A minor gimick type feature at best - however useful.

Frameworks should promote and assist with best practice implementations by providing flexible constructs to work within. ZF largely achieves this with its loosly coupled approach.

I still feel that the framework gives me a lot of production ready components that saved me a great deal of time over the years and helped me form a much more structured application design. The DB abstraction classes are top-notch, the MVC components are overall very good (aside from what I mentioned), Zend_Mail is also useful and the list goes on.

I think the ZF was an important addition to the framework selection for PHP, as an intermediary between Cake and code-igniter. Hopefully version 2.0 will scratch plenty of what’s wrong with the current version and expand on what works well.

If I wanted to program in Java, I would. ZF brought me back to the days of the bloated behemoth that Java Frameworks were (or small-medium web based apps).

I looked at it for about 5 minutes, laughed, then forgot about it.

@Paul Houle: I agree with you, that Zend Framework is a collection of libraries / components, which I consider is a good move. Developers are able to plug-n-play those components into existing frameworks / application. However, I still think a base MVC bootstrap should be included for convenience sake. :) As for the idea of using an in-house framework, yes that is what I have planned for (see: http://thislab.com/2008/03/17/.....lications/).

A lot of ORM implementations are making things more complicated than they should be. Here is a very good presentation on what is wrong with those ORM solutions: http://dave.org.uk/talks/lpm/2006/orm/ I fully agree with the author and reckon ORMs should be intelligent enough to detect relationships and other information from the database/table/field meta data. It seems crazy to me that if I were to model my database in UML, I then have to reapply the same stuff in my code again. This is against the DIY principle and is difficult for future upgrade / maintenance. I’m not entirely too happy with the AR in Rails either, but at least it has a migration mechanism to keep track of changes.

@RStankov: Agreed. :-)

@Seb: Thanks for the link to Sphinx, I will definitely check it out! I do agree with you to a certain degree regarding the flexibility factor of a framework in multi-developer projects. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing to enforce conventions. Python for instance is looking to encourage one way of doing things in the upcoming 3.0 release.

@Wil Sinclair: Thanks again for your comments! Zend Framework is blessed with people like you who really try to get feedback from the community. I would definitely start to submitting tickets (or even patches if I have time). :)

Regarding the version number. Even though it is only a number I still believe people judge the ‘completeness’ of software by their version numbers. And from what I see, Zend Framework has not reached the golden 1.0 yet. But that’s just a trivia thing anyway. :)

Back to research on ZF now… :)