Last night I was thinking about the number of PHP Frameworks that developers and companies are creating over the days, and how it become hard day after day to choose a suitable framework.

If we talk about specifications there are many websites that provides comparison such as phpframeworks.com, but the idea is that features and performance might change over the time. Even reviews and rating are far from being robust information that we could count on to make a decision.

Someone might use a framework for a few time then decide to try something better if it lacks too much in features, or decide to contribute to make the project better. I can try a framework and find it amazing while I can't find time to use it.Someone else can also give no rating for a framework that he rated five stars a year ago for example.

So I thought about a solution which based on :
1- An open database
2- Open contribution
3- Contributions that could be updated anytime and from anywhere

A solution like that could bring many benefits to the community and help tracking easily PHP Frameworks Trends, especially that data are open and anybody can use.

Twitter was a good example to start from, since it's all about "What are you doing?" and I wrote a reply to @phpmagnet with a short list of frameworks that I use, like, and/or suggest between brackets. I have just added a hash #phpmagfrm to be able to monitor easily replies related to PHP Frameworks Trends.

You can write for example :

@phpmagnet #phpmagfrm use[CakePHP,ZendFramework,Symfony] like[limonade] suggest[CodeIgnitor]
@phpmagnet #phpmagfrm use[none] like[tekuna] suggest[DooPHP]
@phpmagnet #phpmagfrm suggest[CakePHP]

Data could then easily be read and parsed into tables or graphics and I wrote quickly a small PHP Frameworks Trends reader here. You can send a new reply to update your choice and so the solution count only on your updates to make it useful.

There is more visualization that could be added later, but I'm more interested to hear your opinion on how could we make such metrics useful.