Thanks for taking the time for the reply. I do agree with your points, and the point about a better programmer was said tongue in cheek. I do hope to get my hands dirty with the Zend Framework since it does seem amazing. But as I mentioned, I believe it might be overkill. I did look at Symfony (will look at Lithium now) but Cake seems to fulfill all the requirements that the project has. Any future requirements for the application have been considered too. So Cake for now, itching to get to Zend.

I’d argue with the assertion that an “emphasis on convention … supposedly makes me a ‘better’ programmer.” Convention-based systems make it easy to get started on green-field projects, but very difficult to customize should you need features that are outside their offering. ZF tries to be flexible and allow the developer to choose — but this flexibility comes at the cost of a steeper learning curve.

If you want the simplicity of a conventions-based framework, but flexibility to use components from other systems later, I’d recommend either Symfony or Lithium (which is a fork of Cake’s version 3 branch, and developed by former Cake developers). Both of these frameworks make it fairly easy to integrate third-party libraries and components, and as such let you guide your own project in a more flexible manner. This will allow you to use features from ZF should you determine you need them later down the line.