Wordpress vs Laravel vs Symfony2

I have a popular online learning project which I am currently redeveloping and I am considering to move away from Wordpress to PHP frameworks. The website is mostly made up of "dynamic articles" and will soon need real time JSON services via Angular for creating managing users, comments, and other models. Wordpress offers a very weak method for handling ajax requests. Creating hooks for each request is not very effective or practical especially for requests with lots of methods. MVC structure seems to be the best solution.

"Wordpress is like the best CMS on the internet". I am a Wordpress developer. My site depends very heavily on SEO so I wonder what SEO benefits I will loose after transferring to Laravel or Symfony2. I don't know what Wordpress core looks like that makes it better at SEO. Wordpress websites perform better in SEO.

In fact I find it easier and quicker to develop in Laravel or Symfony2. It is harder to manage very projects in Wordpress. The functions/include files just grow out of control with files with hundreds of lines. And debugging is a lot of work.

 

I think you should categorized you projects. If you want to build blog kind of site quickly, then use Wordpress. If you want to build big e-commerce site, then use Magento, OS-Commerce, Open Cart. Laravel & Symfony are good frameworks but Wordpress is a CMS as you already knows. Laravel is going to be famous these days. I think you should try Laravel first then Symfony. So it depends on project nature, that what kind of projects you are going to build.

 

CMS vs Framework is the battle of two different tools. It's like a Hammer vs Screw Driver. Sure, both are capable to bang a nail or screw in a wall but there's only one right tool for the job. CMS is Content Management System. Which means if your web sites content needs to be managed through an interface/editor then you will need to use this. A FrameWork provides a toolkit to develop a web application. It gives you a strict design pattern to follow and tons of libraries to be used to accomplish things like database access, captcha, templating, caching, pagination, etc. etc. etc. If you need to develop a web site that provides some sort of service or advanced functionality you most likely will have no use for a CMS but would benefit from a framework.

If I needed to build a personal site, blog, company site, article driven site, or any site the requires someone to add content often as an editor I would use WordPress as a CMS.

If I needed to develop a web site that is more advanced or perhaps will be developed by several programmers I would use a framework like Laravel.

If I needed to build a web site that would require little to no updates that I couldn't foresee changing much I wouldn't use either.

As for which CMS or Framework to use.... It's just a matter of preference. WordPress works as a good CMS but it was never built to be a CMS. Laravel vs Symphony depends on which you find most comfortable with. Laravel is the hot php framework right now. And based on what I've seen it's easy to get started and stable.