Which framework to use: CodeIgniter, Symfony or CakePHP? [closed]
Matter of fact, I was afraid of using a framework because of fear of being stuck with inflexible and slow framework that couldn't handle high traffic website.
CodeIgniter is the most flexible framework of the bunch you have mentioned. It's also the fastest. There are more than a few benchmarks confirming this.
Symphony and Cake are both Rails-esque frameworks that (in my view) will force you to adopt their conventions. CodeIgniter doesn't. You can be extremely liberal in choosing what features you want, and how you want to use the framework. It is also very easy to extend and change core functionality without modification.
Symfony has a good reputation, after that comes CakePHP. I don't know about CodeIgniter.
edit: here is a comparison in french (sorry)
http://www.mti.epita.fr/blogs/2010/06/17/symfony-vs-codeigniter/
The conclusion says CodeIgniter is good for small project, and Symfony is recommended if you have a bigger project to do (more than a month to dev).