Newbie and PHP Frameworks

Start with CodeIgniter if you are new to frameworks. Both Symfony and ZF have a greater learning curve and if you're not familiar with some concepts you might get fustrated in the beginning with the more complex frameworks .

I would suggest you to go with Symfony 2 since it has got lots of good stuff built around it. Take a look at this article http://www.phparch.com/2010/02/symfony-2-benchmarks/.

Hope this link is very useful on learning Symfony 2. It's a tutorials based on days (21) teaching you how to create a calendar website. Good luck.

http://symfony.com/blog/do-you-know-jobeet

More:

1. http://symfony2easy.blogspot.com/
2. http://www.dobervich.com/2011/03/03/symfony2-blog-application-tutorial-part-i-project-setup/, http://www.dobervich.com/2011/03/05/symfony2-blog-application-tutorial-part-ii-the-data-model/, http://www.dobervich.com/2011/03/09/symfony2-blog-application-tutorial-part-iii-routing-controllers-and-templates/

it really adds up to what your requirements are.

Symfony is great, though my only bash on it is that it requires PHP 5.3, which is great, but make sure your host has 5.3 support. Also the issue of using CLI bugs me.

CodeIgniter 2 on the other hand requires 5.1.6, which is good for me as my host is still on 5.2; I also like how small CI was compared to Zend or Symfony. Now like you i like some of symfony's components and i use 2 of them (swift mailer & twig) on my CI install. doesnt mean you should just junk ci and go symfony. CI is built to be a stepping stone framework that you can build on. Symfony to me is a full-fledged framework with everything and the kitchen sink.

having said all that, not all frameworks are created equal. I use CI for one project and Kohana for another. Kohana offered me something i liked that CI didnt do and thats fine.

I think you should look at the different frameworks out there, some are full featured, some are bare-bones and allow you to grow with your needs.