Selection of My First Framework (PHP)

And here I am using symfony and have never yet regretted. The opposite possibilities more than enough. To learn is not so difficult, as a lot of documentation including misrepresented and translated into Russian. Not little Russian community. Plus coming soon, symfony 2, but there are even more Goodies ;)

I looked at cakephp, symfony, CodeIgniter, Kohana, Yii, Akelos and some more.
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From the above CakePHP is well documented and fairly easy to learn. Of the shortcomings can be noted support for PHP4 and not very progressive community, albeit large.
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Yii — cool stuff written using PHP5 and fashion design patterns, moreover, tightly integrated with chips web2.0 (AJAX). Good documentation of the APIs, but almost no examples.
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Akelos is too crude.
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CodeIgniter is php4, weak ORM.
Kohana (a fork from CodeIgniter) — php5, poorly documented, weak ORM.
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Symfony — trying to make a clone RubyOnRails php. However it is more difficult to learn than the original and offers less opportunities. IMHO better then rails, or learn Django.
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The result:
for beginners cakephp, yii advanced

But what I've seen:
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\rCakePHP is well-documented, but too much of it is just "magic" to recommend would not.
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\rCodeigniter is well documented, the code is sometimes not so hot and not only because of the support of PHP4.
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\rKohana code is beautiful, and documentation for the development of enough, but with him I was casually seeing Yii.
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\rZend Framework — code and documentation everything is fine, only both of them too much, and the docks still confused and most uncertain moments, as an evil, is omitted. I'm using ZF as the set of high-quality libraries, not as CMF. Sometimes unwieldy because of too fine grained structure, and as a consequence a huge number of classes.
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\rYii — documentation — a rich, transparent, and generally lovely. Code and architecture is gorgeous. It has a fantastic ORM. The barrier to entry is low — read from cover to cover Hyde (he's not that great) and fight. Competent autoload'and nimble. Recommend!

Judging by the pace and direction of development, Yii has a great future ahead. That would be important, where will a critical mass of developers to build knowledge base examples modules. I stopped it, join. :)

Maybe it's worth once on a CMS/CMF? For example, Drupal provides an opportunity of riveting banal sitega quick, and the frame for developing applications (api.drupal.org)

The new job had to learn the Yii — mastered very quickly (a few days literally). Third month working closely with this framework. In my opinion excellent, a well considered piece. Perfect for projects of any complexity, IMHO. I recommend to get acquainted.
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ZF is too heavy, in my opinion. And CodeIgniter is simply outdated.

To me about six months ago I addressed the people with this question. Advised him Symfony. Recently again met him, the person I really was thankful.