It seems everyone is talking about frameworks these days - even the PHP community is no different. Talk of the Zend Framework and other MVC-based offerings out there is showing up on sites and blogs all over. On one, however, Brandon asks the question more should think of on a daily basic - what makes a good framework?

As of lately, I've been working on making a simple low key MVC framework. This isn't a project that will be released to the community or large amount of people, its for building on a level of personal development, to mentally challenge myself, and to touch up on my PHP skills.During this process, I begun to question the motivation and driving points behind these builds. What exactly makes a good framework? Everyone and their dog are using them, what exactly is the advantage point of using a framework over hard coding, something on the go.

He is of the opinion that the real key to a good framework is that it be easily customizable, that "users and developers should be able to adapt it to their specific needs". It should also allow for this expansion by anyone, not just a certain set of developers. He reminds us what frameworks are for (to make life easier! remember?) and gives a warning to choose carefully which of them you choose to base your code on.