I think that I have finally settled on a consistent framework for most of my future PHP development – Kohana.

I have used Symfony, CakePHP and Zend but have not used them deeply enough to go into a proper comparison.  All of the frameworks seem well written and fulfil the purpose of rapidly creating a MVC application. 

So why did I choose Kohana?

• Mainly it was just personal preference, Kohana just felt a little less restrictive and a tad more intuitive
• I liked the cascading file system, it just seems to make sense
• No CLI fun

However it could be that because I have tried the other frameworks that using any other MVC framework would have felt much easier.

I will admit that I have some concerns with Kohana:

1. There are two active streams of development?!?  Kohana 2 is traditional MVC while Kohana 3 has been rewritten for HMVC.  Kohana 3 is not the latest release of the framework, it is a different framework.  The two are incompatible which has major implications with module development and deployment.
2. The lack of documentation is not an issue for me, I am happy to trawl through the code, but the documentation that exists I found muddled and confused. I found the Unofficial Wiki much more useful.

Of the two streams, I have chosen to go with Kohana 3.  I am working on new projects and so it didn’t really matter which one I chose.

I don’t expect that I will ever stop looking for the perfect solution, if indeed it actually exists.  I suspect that in my career I will be using a number of different framework's for different specific circumstances.