Chris Tankersley has posted his look at the Lithium framework as someone familiar with frameworks, just not one quite like this.

Since my day job was generous enough to give me the entire week off (as a reward, thankfully not a "Don't bother coming into work next week, or ever" kind of thing), I decided that I would spend some time looking at a new framework. I haven't looked hard a new framework since I really started working with Zend Framework a few years ago. I decided to take a look at Lithium, an up-and-coming 5.3 only PHP framework.

In the process of following through their blog tutorial, Chris came across a few other things to mention like the filtering system, the simplicity of getting the MVC app up and working and the 5.3-ness of it all. He also mentions a few downsides to using the framework:

• the rapid evolution of the code is good, but the documentation is lacking and not as up to date
• a lack of community documentation/examples
• relational databases are treated as a second class citizen