On the ZFort.com blog there's a new post that talks about the "Mexican standoff" between PHP frameworks, covering some of the background behind some of the more popular ones and some of the main differences between them.

PHP is one of the most widely known and potent programming languages used today. However, despite the popularity of PHP, there are many businesses using PHP without making use of a quality PHP framework. This approach slows production time and increases costs. A PHP framework is advantageous because it provides you with modules and codebase to help structure and accelerate the web development process.

[...] For CEOs, CTOs, product owners and those in the tech industry, choosing the right PHP framework can help cut production time and costs. However, every PHP framework is unique. [...] Given the wealth of PHP frameworks available, it is important to conduct solid research in order to find the platform that’s right for you. [We'll] take a look at three of the most popular PHP frameworks (Symfony, Laravel and Yii) and break down which is the best, and why.

The article then goes on to cover three of the more widely used frameworks:

• Symfony
• Laravel
• Yii Framework

For each the author covers some of the origins of the framework and some of the things that it's best at. Following these there's a section that briefly compares them and how approachable they are for developers new to frameworks. While they all have their strengths the author recommends Symfony as the framework with "the most long term potential" over the others.