When comparing Silex vs Joomla!, the Slant community recommends Silex for most people. In the question“What are the best PHP frameworks?” Silex is ranked 14th while Joomla! is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose Silex is:
The thing that makes Silex stand out from other PHP microframeworks is the fact that it's built using some of Symfony2's components. Making it quite powerful but still lightweight enough to be considered a true microframework.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Built on top of Symfony components
The thing that makes Silex stand out from other PHP microframeworks is the fact that it's built using some of Symfony2's components. Making it quite powerful but still lightweight enough to be considered a true microframework.
Pro Open source
Silex is open source and is licensed under the MIT license.
Pro Simple and elegant DI container
Based on Pimple, Silex has a simple Dependency Injection container that consists of just one file and one class.
Pro Testable
Silex makes use of Symfony2's HttpKernel which is used to abstract requests and responses. This in turn, makes it very easy to test apps created with the framework.
Pro Extensible
By using Pimple, the Silex application extends the Pimple class, which in turn is nothing more than an implementation of the ArrayAccess interface that has been a part of PHP since version 5.0.
This makes it possible to use an instance of the Application class as if it were an array. Like so:
$app = new Silex\Application();
$app['config'] = new Config($config_path);
This gives developers a great deal of flexibility when injecting dependencies and when testing.
Pro Highly customizable templates
Joomla allows for heavily customizable templates to be changed from the admin interface without needing to hack.
Pro Powerful and user-friendly admin interface
Admin interface is constantly being iterated on to remove unnecessary legacy features and to streamline the interface. Resulting in a very clean and easy to understand interface that also offers a wide range of options.
Pro More than 8000 extensions
Which can be found here.
Pro Easy to pick up
Pro Great for social networking and commerce sites
Joomla has both a good native support and a great list of extensions that make creating either a social networking or a commerce site easy.
Cons
Con Documentation is not very extensive
The documentation for this framework is average, it's helpful mostly. But it is not extensive enough to cover everything in detail unfortunately.
Con Insecure
It's common-place for a Joomla-based website to be defaced, often very quickly. This is most often due to the low quality of extensions.
Con Extensions are scarce, badly maintained & rarely good
If it's not part of the default Joomla installation, quality extensions are rare. Joomla has a extensions library, but it is full of abandoned, dated or bloated components, modules and plugins.
