[eluser]Richard Rowe[/eluser]
Firstly, I'd like to apologize if I've posted this in the wrong forum.
I'm fairly new to PHP frameworks, but I have worked with both CakePHP and CodeIgniter. I feel both CakePHP and CodeIgniter have their strengths and weaknesses, but I'm having a hard time choosing which (if any at all) would fit my next web application best.
I personally have always preferred CodeIgniter because it's a lightweight, flexible, and organized framework. CodeIgniter uses my preferred coding standards, and has a very clear and complete documentation. CakePHP on the other hand implements the MVC design pattern properly, maps the database tables and has a powerful ACL / Auth system.
The application is a customer management control panel, handling billing, support as well as management for the various services we'll offer, specifically domain names, virtual private servers and dedicated servers. The system is tailored around the user, so giving the user "total control" from one location is fairly important. As for the domain name management, I'm thinking of using an adaptor design pattern to interact with multiple APIs from different domain name resellers, and eventually the .nz and .au registry (once we become accrediated). The hosting management will be something similar to HyperVM, but needs to be very flexible as we may venture into shared cloud hosting in the future.
I could imagine users would appreciate being able to manage everything from one control panel. However, because this system is so big should it be split up into seperate web applications. I really don't have enough experience in application design (yet) to think about this at the moment. Any ideas, suggestions, etc would be very much appreciated. The entire system will be stand alone though, I am probably going to be using a Content Management System (like ExpressionEngine 2.0) to manage the Website offering these services.
The system has to be extremely flexible, as we're not sure if we're going to deploy the hosting and domain names has separate companies/services or all-in-one.
We will obviously need a powerful ACL and Auth system (Full admins, admins, support-only staff, billing-only staff, etc etc), but if CodeIgniter is right for us we're willing to use user-contributed libraries or develop our own. I also find the database mapping extremely useful, and recursive mysql queries. As this is a very long-term project, we do not need PHP 4 support, we need something that is going to keep up to date and utalise the latest Web technologies including PHP 6 when it arrives. So we need a framework that will 'grow' with us.
My question is what is the best framework for me, if any at all? Hope some of this actually made sense.
Appreciate any help.
Richard
