Brian Moon was a presenter at the PHP Community Conference that just wrapped up last week where he talked about Phorum and some general thoughts on frameworks. In his latest post he recaps some of these thoughts and comments.

n my session, I talked about the history of Phorum. One of the things I covered was the early days of PHP. Back in the 90s, before PHP, most dynamic web work was done in C or Perl. At that time, in those worlds, you had to do all the HTTP work yourself. [...] PHP changed all that. You had a default content type of text/html. You had automatic handling of request variables. Cookies were easily ingested and output. You could template your HTML with script instead of having to write everything out via print or stdout. It was amazing. Who could ask for more?

He talks about frameworks as a tool, but not one that everyone really needs. For quite a few sites, they can be overkill and time spent implementing them could be used for other things. For those that want to use them, there's lots of flavors to pick from, but he reminds you to be mindful of performance trade-offs. He mentions the commoditization of frameworks and how frameworks, like it or not, are everywhere (even if it's just lightweight custom code you threw together for a prototype).