1. CodeIgniter – CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications. If you’re a developer who lives in the real world of shared hosting accounts and clients with deadlines, and if you’re tired of ponderously large and thoroughly undocumented frameworks codeIgniter is right for you.

2. Zend – Zend Framework is an open source, object oriented web application framework for PHP 5. ZF is often called a ‘component library’, because it has many loosely coupled components that you can use more or less independently. But Zend Framework also provides an advanced Model-View-Controller (MVC) implementation that can be used to establish a basic structure for your ZF applications.

3. CakePHP – CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications. Using commonly known design patterns like MVC and ORM within the convention over configuration paradigm, CakePHP reduces development costs and helps developers write less code.

4. Yii – Yii – a high-performance component-based PHP framework best for developing large-scale Web applications. Yii comes with a full stack of features, including MVC, DAO/ActiveRecord, I18N/L10N, caching, jQuery-based AJAX support, authentication and role-based access control, scaffolding, input validation, widgets, events, theming, Web services, and so on. Written in strict OOP, Yii is easy to use and is extremely flexible and extensible.

5. Symfony – Symfony is a full-stack framework, a library of cohesive classes written in PHP. It provides an architecture, components and tools for developers to build complex web applications faster. Choosing symfony allows you to release your applications earlier, host and scale them without problem, and maintain them over time with no surprise.

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